Carter, a model for those who say “Why not me?”

ATLANTA (AP) — As the 2024 campaign begins, political players look in the mirror and decide if they see an American president watching them.

It was no different for Jimmy Carter in the early 1970s. And it took meeting several presidential candidates, then the encouragement of an esteemed former secretary of state before the young governor of Georgia, who had no never met a president, sees himself as someone of greater stature.

He announced his candidacy for the White House on December 12, 1974, amid the fallout from the Vietnam War and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. He then took advantage of his status as an unknown – and politically unblemished – to become the 39th President of the United States. Since then, this meteoric breakthrough has been a model, explicit or not, for aspirants.

“Jimmy Carter’s example certainly created a 50-year gap of people saying, ‘Why not me? ‘” said Steve Schale, who has worked on President Barack Obama’s campaigns and is a longtime supporter of President Joe Biden.

Carter’s rise is attracting new attention as the 98-year-old politician and activist receives hospice care at his home in Plains, Georgia.

David Axelrod, who helped orchestrate Obama’s four-year rise from state senator to the Oval Office, said Carter’s model was more about how his strategy of relying on the community turned the Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses on your springboard.

“The country had a moral stain, and he was a guy with deep faith,” Axelrod said. “It felt like a fresh start, and I think he understood that he could offer something different that could be worth it.”

Donna Brazile, who led Democrat Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, made her debuts in Carter’s two national campaigns. “1976 was just the Jimmy Carter era,” he said.

Of course, the seeds of his run for president germinated even before Nixon won a second term and certainly before his resignation in August 1974.

Carter says he didn’t run for governor in 1966 — he lost the race — or in 1970 with Washington in mind. Even when he announced his candidacy for the presidency, neither he nor those close to him were completely convinced that he would make it.

“President of what? his mother replied when he told her of his plans.

But soon after he became governor in 1971, Carter’s team envisioned him as a national-level politician. They were encouraged in part by the May 31 cover of Time magazine, which featured Carter next to the headline: “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune” (Dixie is a term for the southern United States, specifically states that have formed the Confederacy in the Civil War). Inside, a flattering profile said Carter was a model governor of the “New South,” a term used by reformers who called for a modernization of society and attitudes in post-war Southern states.

In October 1971, Dr. Peter Bourne, an Atlanta doctor and Carter ally who would eventually become America’s drug enforcement official, sent his brother-in-law an unsolicited note saying she was explaining how he could be elected president. On October 17, a wide circle of advisers met Carter at Governor’s Mansion to examine him. Carter, then 47, wore a T-shirt and jeans, according to his biographer Jonathan Alter.

The team, which included Carter’s wife Rosalynn, now 95, began to seriously consider the idea.

“We never use the word ‘president’,” Carter recalled on his 90th birthday, “we only mean ‘a position at the national level’.”

Carter invited prominent Washington-based Democrats who had shown up or were planning to show up in 1972 to private gatherings at the mansion. Later, he jumped at the chance to lead the Democratic National Committee’s national campaign. This position allowed him to travel the country to help candidates through the ballot.

He was among the Southern governors tipped to be George McGovern’s running mate in 1972. Alter said Carter was never seriously considered for a running for vice president.

In any case, Carter met with, among others, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senators Henry Jackson of Washington, Eugene McCarthy of Maine and McGovern of South Dakota, who was overtaken by Nixon in the election.

Carter later explained that he had previously defined the nation’s highest office by those who held it and were immortalized with monuments.

“For the first time,” Carter told the New York Times, “I began to compare my own experiences and knowledge of government with the candidates, not with ‘the presidency’ or with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. It made things a lot easier.”

Aide Hamilton Jordan crafted a detailed campaign plan calling for promoting Carter’s good governance and outside credentials to disillusioned voters in general, even before the Watergate scandal. But the team still spoke and wrote in cryptic language, as if it was unclear what they meant by “high load.”

During his campaign, Carter allegedly told his family members around Christmas 1972 that he would run in 1976. Carter later wrote in a memoir that a visit by former Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1973 had reaffirmed his inclinations.

Carter described Rusk in glowing terms. “Our most distinguished Georgian citizen,” Carter called the man who led the State Department under the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

During another private meeting in Atlanta, Rusk told Carter directly, “Governor, I think you should run for president in 1976.” This, Carter wrote, “removed remaining doubts”.

Schale said the process isn’t always that complicated.

“They are already extremely competitive people,” he said of governors, senators and others who hold high public office. “If you’re already locked into this ability, it’s hard to let go.”

But Schale and Axelrod stressed that circumstances matter.

“We felt that what people felt was missing from our politics,” Axelrod said of Obama and his “Hope and Change” theme.

“He seemed uniquely positioned to answer that call…where others weren’t,” Axelrod said, alluding to Hillary Clinton’s long history as a liability given voter anger over the war in Iraq and other questions at the end of George W. Bush’s speech. presidency.

Republican Donald Trump hit back in 2016, riding a populist wave of discontent after Obama’s two terms. Schale noted that Biden, then vice president, pulled out of the race that year in part because Obama privately endorsed a second Clinton run.

Yet in 2020, Biden, then 77, came out of retirement specifically to relentlessly attack Trump, calling him a “threat to the nation.” Biden won.

“Would he have run if there had been someone else in that position other than Trump? No way,” Schale said.

Now 80 years old, apparently the president is going to run again. And also Trump, 76 years old. This has brought new messengers onto the scene with what they hope is the right message.

“We are ready, ready to leave behind the stale ideas and faded names of the past,” said Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old former UN ambassador, as she launched her February 15 candidacy, an outsider.

The South Carolina Republican’s call for “a new generation to lead us” would appear to be a potential 2024 equivalent of the Georgia Democrat telling voters in his 1976 inaugural address, “Our trust has been betrayed.”

“Jimmy Carter showed us that it’s possible to go from unknown to president in 18 to 24 months,” said Jared Leopold, a top adviser to Washington state Governor Jay’s unsuccessful bid. Inslee, for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

“For the people who decide to participate (in the race), it’s a real inspiration,” Leopold continued, “and it’s a real success story of American democracy.”