PLAINS, Ga. — Barack Obama and his advisers had two living former presidents to consider as they planned the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Bill Clinton, eight years removed from the Oval Office, remained an image of centrist success that warranted a prime-time speaking slot. But Jimmy Carter’s landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan lingered, even 28 years later.
“It was still an epithet: ‘Another Jimmy Carter,’” David Axelrod, a top Obama adviser and confidant, said in an interview.
Obama decided against inviting Carter to the podium in Denver. The Georgia Democrat was featured in a video instead. “Justifiably, I think, he was a little miffed about that,” Axelrod said, adding that the decision was a “painful one” for Obama.
Now, as Carter nears his 100th birthday on Tuesday, the 39th president is being lauded not just for his longevity but for his accomplishments in government, his work as a global humanitarian and, as Obama himself said in a birthday tribute for his fellow Democrat, “for always finding new ways to remind us that we are all created in God’s image.”
It’s a preview, of sorts, of what will happen when Carter’s long life ends and the nation pays tribute with state funeral rites in Washington, D.C. The praise, though, carries some irony for a president who campaigned against the ways of Washington and was an outcast of sorts even during his four years in the White House. To be sure, many presidential hopefuls campaign that way — Reagan and Clinton did it, too. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley of South Carolina tried it as recently as the 2024 GOP primaries.
But for Carter, being a loner even as a power player has been, perhaps, the defining posture of his life — sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by design.
“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider,” biographer Jonathan Alter said.
A ‘Peanut Brigade’
That identity traced back to Carter’s earliest years, growing up on a farm outside of his tiny hometown in South Georgia.
“He was from one of the wealthier families,” Alter noted, because James Earl Carter Sr. owned land that Black tenant farmers worked. But “when he went to school in Plains, and he had been barefoot for most of the year, the kids in town would think of him as a country bumpkin.”
Carter used the dichotomy to position himself for the presidency.
The commonly told version reads like cliché political fantasy: Earnest Baptist, peanut farmer and little-known governor from the Old Confederacy wins on a promise never to mislead Americans after the quagmire in Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s Watergate disgrace.
Yet when Carter decided to run, Nixon was the sole president he had ever met, and that was only briefly at a White House reception. Carter leaned on his extended family, close advisers and other Georgians to blanket key primary states throughout 1975 and early 1976. The inner circle was dubbed the “Georgia mafia.” The rest constituted the “Peanut Brigade.” By the time big-name candidates — senators, mostly — realized Carter was a contender, they could not stop him.
“His was a unique presidency in that it came from completely outside the party establishment and then continued to operate that way even in Washington,” said Joe Trippi, who worked for Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, scion of a Democratic dynasty and Carter’s perpetual liberal rival.
“There was something so outside of Washington about them, such a loyalty and pride about those people,” Trippi said, noting that Carter mostly 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. Carter, as the sitting president in 1980, had to watch convention delegates give Ted Kennedy roaring ovations even after Carter had won their bruising primary fight.
“The Democratic Party never belonged to Jimmy Carter,” Trippi said.
Nor did Carter master Capitol Hill, the national press corps or Washington’s social scene.
David Gergen, White House adviser to four presidents, said Carter “had some legislative successes” but swung and missed on some of his most ambitious proposals because he wouldn’t always take command of negotiations with Congress.
“He handed that responsibility off” to Cabinet officers and aides, Gergen said. “That was not his forte.”
Team didn’t play ‘the game’
Carter in turns embraced and was frustrated by the dynamics.
When he pushed treaties ceding control of the Panama Canal but didn’t have enough support from Democrats, Carter looked to Gerald Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. The former president cajoled Republican senators, and the treaties were adopted.
“I appreciate his help,” Carter wrote in his diary on March 16, 1978. “He’s done everything he promised.”
With the media, however, Carter had no such escape hatch.
In late 1975 and 1976, as Carter grew into a plausible underdog, “the media loved him,” Alter said. But as a Southerner, he also faced deeply held biases, media historian Amber Roessner said.
“Any leading candidate was going to get extra 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 commonly understood anywhere Baptist evangelicals are prevalent, but not so much in the Northeast, where national media is headquartered and where most voters in 1976 were mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or nonreligious.
“Some members of the press treat the South as a suspect nation,” Carter complained in a Playboy magazine interview.
Long after leaving office, the U.S. Naval Academy graduate and engineer still bemoaned a political cartoon published around his inauguration that depicted his family approaching the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” chewing on a hayseed.
In December 1977, when Carter’s team had been in the West Wing less than a year, Washington Post society columnist Sally Quinn labeled them “an alien tribe,” incapable of “playing ‘the game.’” An elite Georgetown hostess herself, Quinn nodded to Washington’s “frivolity” even as she assessed “the Carter people” as “not, in fact, comfortable in limousines, yachts, or in elegant salons, in black tie” or with “place cards, servants, six courses, different forks, three wines … and after-dinner mingling.”
Shaking up establishments
The uneasiness in Washington tracked Carter’s rise in Georgia.
After Earl Carter died, Jimmy Carter followed his father’s path as community leader and businessman. The younger Carter didn’t openly fight Jim Crow segregation laws but publicly refused to join the White Citizens Council. Then he took a state Senate seat in 1962 by challenging a local political boss who had rigged the election against him.
As a good-government lawmaker, Carter cast an outlier vote against money for a new governor’s mansion where his family eventually resided.
He first ran for governor in 1966, dissatisfied with the General Assembly. When he narrowly missed the Democratic runoff, Carter opted not to endorse a fellow racial moderate who had advanced, despite their shared distaste for the other contender: Lester Maddox, an avowed white supremacist. Maddox won. That silence enabled Carter to peel off Maddox supporters to become governor four years later in a race that built his grudge against media megaphones.
“The Atlanta Constitution,” he told Playboy in 1976, “categorized me during the gubernatorial campaign as an ignorant, racist, backward, ultraconservative, redneck south-Georgia peanut farmer,” while framing his big-city opponent as “an enlightened, progressive, well-educated, urbane, forceful, competent public official.”
Once in Atlanta, Carter previewed his Washington tenure, bucking legislators with a reorganization of state government that he pitched as necessary efficiency.
“He spent a lot of political capital making people mad, going after their fiefdoms,” said Terry Coleman, a Carter ally in the Assembly.
Georgia law dictated that Carter couldn’t succeed himself as governor. In Washington, it wasn’t his choice to serve just one term.
Carter returned home in 1981 “humiliated by the voters” and “at least somewhat depressed,” Alter said, but the former president found his most sustained success as an outside influencer once he and 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 maneuvering annoyed his successors and Washington’s foreign policy establishment. Carter criticized U.S. wars in the Middle East, the West’s isolation of North Korea and Israel’s treatment of Palestine. He won a Nobel Peace Prize along the way.
“The best way to understand Carter as outsider is to see him as always understanding the rules of the insider circle,” Roessner said. “He just didn’t always play by them.”
