By all indications, however, mothers across the country can also relate. At campaign stops, women in particular mention approvingly how “real’’ Elizabeth is. They like that she looks like a regular mom, not a supermodel, and admire that she went on to have two more children–she had Emma Claire at the age of 48 and Jack when she was 50– after their older son, 16-year-old Wade, died in a freak highway accident in 1996.

At a rally in West Virginia on Friday, Sharon Rockefeller, the wife of West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, introduced Elizabeth this way: “She connects to real people. She has book smarts and she has street smarts, and she has a lot of common sense, too. She cuts to the chase.’’ Elizabeth doesn’t seem to feel she has to hide the book smarts, either, and pays audiences the rare compliment of assuming that “real’’ people can be moved by poetry.

Addressing the crowd in West Virginia–while standing on tiptoes so she can reach the microphone–she speaks with quiet, articulate passion, and quotes from a favorite poem by Seamus Heaney: “History says, Don’t hope on this side of the grave. But then once in a lifetime, the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.’’ Edwards and Kerry can be that wave, she promises, “the kind of wave that brings a ship to shore.''

Mary Elizabeth Anania Edwards was a Navy brat who moved around a lot as a kid, and met her husband in law school at the University of North Carolina. He is several years younger than she, and came from a more modest background, yet they were alike in the ways that mattered, she has often said, and she fell in love with his sweetness and almost limitless sense of the possible.

They married the Saturday after taking the bar exam, and she went into bankruptcy law, getting settlements for small-business owners, mostly. Eventually, though, she cut her hours back to part time so she could be home with Wade and their daughter Cate (who recently graduated from Princeton) in the afternoons. She quit practicing law altogether after Wade died–not as a retreat from life, but to support her husband’s new career in public service and to mother their new children. “We wanted to reintroduce joy into our lives, not replace Wade,’’ she says simply.

The Edwards and the Kerrys, who live only a block apart in Georgetown, do seem to be having fun together on the road. When John Kerry sits down across the aisle from Elizabeth on the campaign plane and sees that she’s giving an interview, he shouts, “You go, girl!” Teresa Heinz Kerry says that when the four of them are together for dinner, there’s “a lot of irreverence around the table. She’s so smart, very warm and also knows how to survive tough challenges.’’ Heinz Kerry’s first husband, Republican senator H. John Heinz III, died in a plane crash.

Elizabeth often speaks of “parenting Wade’s memory’’ by trying to make a difference in the world, as he would have wanted. And Heinz Kerry says, “I understand that because I do the same thing with Jack’s memory… Having the two babies is another affirmation, and I admire that, too. If I had a ‘Farmer in the Dell’ life I would have liked to have tried to have a baby with John’’ Kerry, whom she married at 55, she says, then laughs at her wistfulness. “But at some point, the shop is closed!’'

Describing the day Edwards was chosen as Kerry’s running mate, Elizabeth says, “I had a hair appointment, and the hair guy was so nice to come and do my hair at my house, so while I have color on I run upstairs and throw underwear in a bag.’’ As she’s talking, an attendant on the plane comes by with the dessert tray. Does she want a brownie? “The answer is yes,’’ sighs Elizabeth, who is on the South Beach diet. “But if you go away I’ll be happier in the long run.”