The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Carter: Still a model for presidential hopefuls
ATLANTA — As the 2024 campaign season begins, political players are looking in the mirror and deciding whether they see an American president staring back.
It was no different for Jimmy Carter in the early 1970s. And it took meeting several presidential candidates and then encouragement from an esteemed elder statesman before the young governor of Georgia, who had never met a president himself, saw himself as something bigger.
He announced his White House bid on Dec. 12, 1974, amid fallout from the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Then he leveraged his unknown — and politically untainted — status to become the 39th president. That whirlwind path has been a model, explicit and otherwise, for wouldbe contenders ever since.
“Jimmy Carter’s example absolutely created a 50-year window of people saying, ‘Why not me?’” said Steve Schale, who worked on President Barack Obama’s campaigns and is a longtime supporter of President Joe Biden.
Carter’s climb is getting new attention as the 98-year-old receives end-of-life care at home in Plains, Georgia.
David Axelrod, who helped engineer Obama’s four-year ascent from state senator to the Oval Office, said Carter’s model is about more than how his grassroots strategy turned the
Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary into his springboard.
“There was a moral stain on the country, and this was a guy of deep faith,” Axelrod said. “He seemed like a fresh start, and I think he understood that he could offer something different that might be able to meet the moment.”
Donna Brazile, who managed Democrat Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, got her start on Carter’s two national campaigns. “In 1976, it was just Jimmy Carter’s time,” she said.
Of course, the seeds of his presidential run sprouted even before Nixon won a second term and certainly before his resignation in August 1974.
In Carter’s telling, he did not
run for governor in 1966 — he lost — or in 1970 thinking about Washington. Even when announced his presidential bid, neither he nor those closest to him were completely confident.
But soon after he became governor in 1971, Carter’s team envisioned him as a national player. They were encouraged in part by the May 31 Time magazine cover depicting Carter alongside the headline “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune.” Inside, a flattering profile framed Carter as a model “New South” governor.
In October 1971, Carter ally Dr. Peter Bourne, an Atlanta physician who would become U.S. drug czar, sent his politician friend an unsolicited memo outlining how he could be elected president. On Oct. 17, a wider circle of advisers sat with Carter at the Governor’s Mansion to discuss it. Carter, then 47, wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, according to biographer Jonathan Alter.
The team, including Carter’s wife Rosalynn, now 95, began considering the idea seriously.
Carter invited high-profile Democrats — Washington players who were running or considering running in 1972 — to one-on-one meetings at the mansion. He jumped at the chance to lead the Democratic National Committee’s national campaign that year.
Carter later explained he had previously defined the nation’s highest office by its occupants immortalized by monuments.
“For the first time,” Carter told The New York Times, “I started comparing my own experiences and knowledge of government with the candidates, not against ‘the presidency’ and not against Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. It made it a whole lot easier.”
Adviser Hamilton Jordan crafted a detailed campaign plan calling for matching Carter’s outsider, good-government credentials to voters’ general disillusionment, even before Watergate. But the team still spoke and wrote in code, as if the “higher office” weren’t obvious.
During another private confab in Atlanta, Rusk told Carter plainly: “Governor, I think you should run for president in 1976.” That, Carter wrote, “removed our remaining doubts.”
Schale said the process is not always so involved.
“These are intensely competitive people already,” he said of governors, senators and others in high office. “If you’re wired in that capacity, it’s hard to step away from it.”
But Schale and Axelrod emphasized that circumstances matter.
“We judged what people felt was missing in our politics,” Axelrod said of Obama and his “Hope and Change” theme.
“He seemed uniquely positioned to answer that call ... where others were not,” Axelrod explained, alluding to Hillary Clinton’s long resume as a liability given voters’ anger over the Iraq war and other matters by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Republican Donald Trump countered in 2016, riding a populist wave of discontent after two Obama terms. Schale noted that Biden, then vice president, passed on 2016 in part because Obama privately backed Clinton’s reprisal bid.
In 2020, though, a 77-year-old Biden came out of retirement specifically to hammer Trump as a threat to the “soul of the nation.” Biden won.
“Does he even run if it’s anybody but Trump in office? No way,” Schale said.
Now 80, the president appears to be running again. So is 76-year-old Trump. That’s drawn new messengers to the stage with what they hope is the right message.