PORTLAND, Ore. – John Edwards, the Democratic candidate for vice president, isn’t doing his job.

A vice presidential nominee traditionally is his campaign’s hit man, landing the verbal punches in the nose, and occasionally below the belt, in order to let the presidential nominee rise above such uncouth brawling. Edwards takes his jabs at President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, but often in a way that leaves his Andy Griffith, nice-guy image intact.

If politics were cable television, Edwards would be a voluble talk show host. The question is whether he needs to start throwing chairs to push up the Democrats’ political ratings.

Edwards’ refusal to speak ill of fellow Democrats during the primaries allowed him to bow out as the candidate of the high road, likely part of his appeal to Sen. John Kerry as a running mate. But with Edwards and John Kerry now behind in most polls, some Democrats worry that Edwards’ tempered style may be depriving them of a weapon they need.

Edwards contends that he’s tough on Bush and Cheney.

“They’ve made a mess out of” Iraq, he said in an interview on his plane, dispensing what amounts to some of the harshest language from his stump speech.

‘A positive person’

So why do the crowds still see him as Mr. Sunshine?

“Because I smile,” he said. “Because they can, I think, see that I am, by nature, a positive person.”

At town hall-style rallies, Edwards, a U.S. senator from North Carolina and a former trial lawyer, mounts a center platform in shirtsleeves, tieless and smiling, and casually works his way around the stage as he talks. His words ring more with disappointment than disgust. He reminded the crowd at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City of Cheney’s speech at the Republican convention.

“Dick Cheney said they have made health care more affordable and more accessible,” Edwards said, ginning up a rumble of boos and hisses. “I don’t know what America they’re talking about, but it’s not the one you and I live in.”

Bush and Cheney aren’t evil, Edwards seems to say. They just know better and should have done better.

“He’s a gentleman,” said John McKillop, a retired junior high school math teacher from Boring, Ore., at the rally, “like the way he ran in the primaries.”

Edwards delivers every speech as if it were his first, sprinkling in references to his own mill town, working-class childhood to establish a kinship with his audience. He seizes spontaneity rather than letting it throw him off-stride.

Barbara Haught, a laid-off worker from a fiberglass plant, told Edwards during a town hall gathering in Parkersburg, W.Va., that she’d recently spoken by phone with her son, Brian McGee, an Air Force sergeant in Iraq. He told her that three of his comrades had been killed, partly because their vehicle wasn’t sufficiently armored, and said she should ask Edwards what he’d do to get the troops the equipment they need.

“I want you to tell your son,” Edwards began, as the room quieted, “how very proud we are of him.”

The crowd erupted in applause. Edwards said Kerry would never send troops into battle without the right gear or “a plan to win the peace,” that Kerry was the only candidate who knew firsthand the sacrifices of war and that under a Kerry administration, Haught’s son would receive the veterans’ benefits he needs when he leaves the military.

Edwards quickly draws audiences into his performance, leading them through the logic of his argument as he once did with juries. Bush, he said, could have sided with the American people and supported re-importing less expensive prescription drugs from Canada or sided with the drug companies that opposed it.

“Who did he choose?” Edwards asks.

“Drug companies!” the crowd shouts back.