Jimmy Carter at 100: A powerful maverick from the farm to the White House and on the world stage

PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Barack Obama and his advisers had two living former presidents to consider when planning the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Bill Clinton, out of the Oval Office for eight years, remained a symbol of centrist success that warranted a prime-time speaking slot. But Jimmy Carter The landslide defeat against Ronald Reagan continued 28 years later.

“It was still an epithet: ‘Another Jimmy Carter,'” David Axelrod, Obama’s top adviser and confidante, said in an interview.

Obama decided against inviting Carter to the podium in Denver. Instead, the Georgia Democrat was featured in a video. “I think he was right to be a little upset about it,” Axelrod said, adding that the decision was “painful” for Obama.

Now that Carter is approaching his 100th birthday On October 1, the 39th president will be praised not only for his longevity, but also for his achievements in government, his work as a global humanitarian and, as Obama himself said in a birthday celebration for his fellow Democrat, “for being always found new ways.” to remind us that we are all created in God’s image.”

It’s a preview, so to speak, of what will happen when Carter’s long life ends and the nation pays tribute to him with state funeral rites in Washington. But there is some irony in the praise for a president who fought against Washington’s approach and was something of an outsider even during his four years in the White House. Certainly many presidential candidates campaign this way—Clinton and Reagan did it too. Governor of Florida. Ron DeSantis And Nikki Haley The state of South Carolina didn’t try it until the 2024 GOP primary. But for Carter, being a loner even as a power player was perhaps the defining attitude of his life – sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by design.

“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider,” said biographer Jonathan Alter.

Leader of a “peanut brigade”

This identity dates back to Carter’s early years, growing up on a farm outside his small hometown in South Georgia.

“He came from one of the wealthier families,” Alter noted, because James Earl Carter Sr. owned land that black sharecroppers farmed. But “when he went to school in Plains and was barefoot most of the year, the kids in town thought he was a country farmer.”

Carter used the dichotomy to position himself for the presidency.

The oft-told version reads like a clichéd political fantasy: Earnest Baptist, peanut farmer and little-known governor of the Old Confederacy, wins by promising never to lead Americans astray after the quagmire of Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s Watergate disgrace.

But when Carter decided to run, Nixon was the only president he had ever met, and only briefly at a White House reception. Carter relied on his extended family, close advisers, and other Georgians to cover key primary states in 1975 and early 1976. The inner circle was dubbed the “Georgia Mafia.” The rest formed the “Peanut Brigade.” Once big-name candidates—mainly senators—realized that Carter was a candidate, they could no longer stop him.

“His presidency was unique in that it came from completely outside the party establishment and then continued to operate that way in Washington,” said Joe Trippi, who worked for Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, scion of a Democratic dynasty and Carter’s eternal one Liberal rival.

“There was something extraordinary about them, such loyalty and such pride in these people,” Trippi said, noting that Carter largely avoided appointing veterans of the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Obama, Reagan and certainly Donald Trump challenged the establishment as candidates, but ultimately absorbed their parties. As sitting president in 1980, Carter watched as congressional delegates gave Ted Kennedy a thunderous ovation, even after Carter won their painful primary campaign.

“The Democratic Party never belonged to Jimmy Carter,” Trippi said.

Nor did Carter dominate Capitol Hill, the national press corps, or the Washington social scene.

David Gergen, a White House adviser to four presidents, said Carter “had some legislative successes” but missed some of his most ambitious proposals because he did not always take the lead in negotiations with Congress.

“He has handed over this responsibility to cabinet officials and staff,” Gergen said. “That wasn’t his strength.”

Refusing to play “the game.”

Carter took turns hugging each other, frustrated by the dynamic.

When he pushed through treaties to cede control of the Panama Canal but failed to get enough support from Democrats, Carter relied on Gerald Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. The former president persuaded Republican senators and the treaties were approved.

“I appreciate his help,” Carter wrote in his diary on March 16, 1978. “He did everything he promised.”

With the media, however, Carter had no way out.

In late 1975 and 1976, as Carter grew into a credible outsider, “the media loved him,” Alter said. But as a Southerner, he also faced deep-rooted prejudices, said media historian Amber Roessner.

“Every top candidate faced special scrutiny after Watergate,” she said, “but for Carter it was even more intense.”

When Carter described himself as a “born-again Christian,” the reference was widely understood wherever Baptist evangelicals predominate, but not so much in the Northeast, where the national media is headquartered and where most voters in 1976 were Protestant, Catholic and Jewish were or non-religious.

“Some members of the press,” Carter complained in an interview with Playboy magazine, “are treating the South as a suspect nation.”

Long after he left office, the US Naval Academy graduate and engineer lamented a political cartoon that was published in connection with his inauguration represented his family He approaches the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” chewing on a hay seed.

In December 1977, when Carter’s team had been in the West Wing for less than a year, Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn called them “an alien tribe” incapable of “playing the game.” Quinn, herself an elite Georgetown hostess, nodded to Washington’s “frivolity,” even as she described “the Carter people” as “actually not comfortable in limousines or yachts or in elegant salons, in black tie” or with “place cards, servants , six courses, different forks, three wines… and a social gathering after dinner.”

Shake up companies

Unrest in Washington accompanied Carter’s rise in Georgia.

After Earl Carter’s death, Jimmy Carter followed his father’s path as a community leader and businessman. The younger Carter did not openly fight against Jim Crow segregation laws, but publicly refused to join the White Citizens Council. Then in 1962 he won a state Senate seat by challenging a local political boss who had rigged the election against him.

As a good government representative, Carter exceptionally voted against money for a new governor’s mansion, where his family eventually resided.

He first ran for governor in 1966 due to dissatisfaction with the General Assembly. When he narrowly missed the Democratic runoff, Carter chose not to support another racist moderate who had risen despite their shared dislike of the other candidate: Lester Maddox, an avowed white supremacist. Maddox won. That silence allowed him to stand out from Maddox supporters and become governor four years later, in a race that increased his resentment of the media megaphones.

“The Atlanta Constitution,” he told Playboy in 1976, “categorized me during the gubernatorial campaign as an ignorant, racist, backwards, ultra-conservative, backstabbing peanut farmer from South Georgia,” while calling his big-city opponent “enlightened, progressive, educated, worldly.” , energetic, competent official.”

In Atlanta, Carter previewed his term in Washington, where he confronted lawmakers with a restructuring of state government that he described as a need for efficiency.

“He spent a lot of political capital making people angry and going after their fiefdoms,” said Terry Coleman, a Carter ally in the caucus.

Georgia law stipulated that Carter could not succeed himself as governor. In Washington, it was not his decision to serve just one term.

Carter returned home in 1981 “humiliated by the voters” and “at least somewhat depressed,” Alter said, but had his most lasting success as an outside influencer while dating Rosalynn Carter founded the Carter Center in Atlanta in 1982.

Decades of global democracy and human rights advocacy followed. Some of the former president’s international maneuvers angered his successors and the Washington foreign policy establishment. Carter criticized the United States’ wars in the Middle East, the West’s isolation of North Korea and Israel’s treatment of Palestine. He also won a Nobel Peace Prize.

“The best way to understand Carter as an outsider is to see him as always understanding the rules of the insider circle,” Roessner said. “He just didn’t always play along.”