John Edwards has a big problem. He’s a serious candidate who will make Clinton and Obama sweat. But despite being a trial lawyer who often sounds scripted, he’s trying to run as the candidate of authenticity. That’s a mistake in a political culture that is obsessed with exposing hypocrisy and artifice. The way that Jason Zengerle savages Edwards in a New Republic profile is a preview of things to come:

Presidential candidates, of course, are given to pat answers–partly because they’re so often asked the same questions, partly because being candid carries so many risks. But Edwards’s exceptional guardedness seems strange for a candidate who now makes such a fetish of authenticity–for a candidate, in fact, who makes a pointed distinction between guarded, pabulum-spewing politicians and candid, truth-telling leaders. “What happens with politicians,” he recently told a public radio interviewer, “is that you’re conditioned not to be yourself. You’re conditioned to say the same thing over and over and over, because that’s the safe route. … We need a leader, or leaders, who are willing to be themselves, who’ll tell the truth as they see it.” Or, as he complained to me about the last presidential campaign, during which he seems to think he acted more like a politician than a leader: “It was just plastic, there was a lot of plasticity to it. You know–young, Southern, dynamic, charismatic, beautiful family, all that. People need to see who I am, what my character is.” Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like something Edwards says in a “behind the scenes” video his campaign recently posted on YouTube: “I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am. … I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll you put up in front of audiences.”

About the only time Edwards seemed to switch off autopilot during the interview was when he talked about poverty. “You should cut me off on this,” he warned, “because I spend a lot of time talking about this.” And he did. He talked about his various ideas for fighting poverty–raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, reforming public housing, creating one million federally funded “stepping stone” jobs at nonprofits or government agencies. He talked about just how much he still had to learn and how even he sometimes felt despair about the intractable nature of the problem. “The cultural component of poverty and what feeds the cycle of poverty–I don’t think I ever really got it until, like, for the fifteenth time I’m sitting with a 33-year-old, 32-year-old mother who has a 14-year-old who’s having the third child,” he said. “And you hear that and it’s just, ‘How will they ever get out?’ You know, it’s ‘What can you do?’” He seemed genuinely offended when I asked him whether he was surprised that Americans’ post-Katrina concern about poverty had waned so rapidly. “I think it’s very superficial to suggest that there was interest [and] it’s gone,” he said. “It’s not gone. It’s still there. It’s just not on the surface. … It’s deeper down.”

A few hours later, Edwards went to one of those places where the interest in poverty was anything but buried: the dinner banquet honoring local community activists… Edwards launched into a speech that followed, almost to the letter, the same trajectory as our interview: the same policy proposals, the same observations, even the same revelatory anecdotes. “One of the things that I’ve been struck by in the work that we’ve been doing over the last several years is that you sit with a mother, a single mom … and her 14-year-old daughter is giving birth to the third child. And it just feeds this cycle of poverty.” What had sounded so fresh and genuine to me only hours before already seemed stale and scripted.

At this point in the cycle, Edwards should be trying to address his weaknesses (lack of policy knowledge, not being as brilliant as his rivals), not reinforcing them. Zengerle’s piece is going to reinforce the conventional wisdom among reporters, which could create a narrative that will doom Edwards.