Jimmy Carter as a power-playing loner from the farm to the White House and onto the world stage

PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Barack Obama and his advisers took two living former presidents into account as they planned the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Bill Clinton, eight years out of the White House, remained a model of centrist success that warranted a prime-time speaking engagement. But Jimmy Carter’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan lingered, even 28 years later.

“It was still a curse word: ‘Another Jimmy Carter,’” David Axelrod, Obama’s top adviser and confidant, said in an interview.

Obama decided not to invite Carter to the Denver stage. The Georgia Democrat was shown in a video instead. “He was, I think rightly so, a little bit peeved about it,” Axelrod said, adding that the decision was “painful” for Obama.

As Carter approaches his 100th birthday, the 39th president is being praised not only for his long service, but also for his achievements in government, his work as a global humanitarian and, as Obama himself said in a birthday tribute to his fellow party member, “for always finding new ways to remind us that we are all created in God’s image.”

It’s a foretaste of what will happen when Carter’s long life comes to an end and the nation pays tribute with state funeral rites in Washington. But the praise is ironic for a president who campaigned against Washington customs and was something of an outsider even during his four years in the White House. Of course, many presidential candidates have campaigned that way — Clinton and Reagan did too. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley of South Carolina tried it as recently as the 2024 GOP primaries. But for Carter, being a loner, even as a powerful player, has perhaps been the defining attitude of his life — sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by design.

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

Leading a ‘Peanut Brigade’

That identity dates back to Carter’s early childhood, when he was growing up on a farm outside his small hometown in southern Georgia.

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

Carter used this division to position himself for the presidency.

The version often told reads like a cliché of political fantasy: Earnest Baptist, peanut farmer and little-known governor of the old Confederacy, wins on a promise never to deceive Americans again after the quagmire of Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s Watergate disgrace.

Yet Nixon was the only president Carter ever met when he decided to run, and that was 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 called the “Georgia Mafia.” The rest formed the “Peanut Brigade.” By the time big names—mostly senators—realized Carter was a contender, they could do nothing to stop him.

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

“There was something so out of Washington about them, such a loyalty and pride in those people,” Trippi said, noting that Carter generally avoided appointing veterans of the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Obama, Reagan, and especially Donald Trump challenged the establishment as candidates, but ultimately took over their parties. Carter, as sitting president in 1980, had to watch as convention delegates gave Ted Kennedy an ovation, even after Carter had won their painful primary battle.

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

Carter also did not control Capitol Hill, the national press, or Washington social life.

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

“He passed that responsibility” to Cabinet officials and aides, Gergen said. “That was not his strong suit.”

Refusing to play ‘the game’

Carter was alternately frustrated and not frustrated by the dynamics.

When he pushed through treaties to cede control of the Panama Canal but failed to gain enough support from Democrats, Carter turned to Gerald Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. The former president convinced Republican senators and the treaties passed.

“I appreciate his help,” Carter wrote in his diary on March 16, 1978. “He has done everything he said he would do.”

However, Carter had no way out through the media.

In late 1975 and 1976, as Carter emerged as a plausible underdog, “the media loved him,” Alter says. But as a Southerner, he also faced deep-seated prejudices, says media historian Amber Roessner.

“Any leading candidate would come under increased 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 are present, but not so much in the Northeast, where the national media is headquartered and where most voters in 1976 were Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or nonreligious.

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

Long after he left office, the U.S. Naval Academy graduate and engineer was still complaining about a political cartoon published around his inauguration, which showed his family walking toward the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” munching 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 “a strange tribe,” incapable of “playing the game.” Quinn, herself an elite Georgetown hostess, nodded to Washington’s “frivolity,” even as she judged “the Carter people” as “not really at ease in limousines, yachts or elegant salons, in black tie” or with “name cards, valets, six courses, several forks, three wines … and after-dinner socializing.”

Shake up settings

The unrest in Washington followed Carter’s rise in Georgia.

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

Carter, a legislator who advocated good government, voted against funding for a new governor’s mansion where his family would eventually live.

He first ran for governor in 1966, dissatisfied with the General Assembly. When he narrowly missed the Democratic runoff, Carter chose not to endorse a racially moderate colleague who had made it despite their shared distaste for the other candidate: Lester Maddox, an outspoken white supremacist. Maddox won. That silence allowed him to shed Maddox supporters four years later and become governor in a race that deepened his resentment of media bullhorns.

“The Atlanta Constitution,” he told Playboy in 1976, “categorized me during the gubernatorial campaign as an ignorant, racist, backward, ultraconservative, redneck peanut farmer from south Georgia,” while portraying his big-city opponent as “an enlightened, progressive, well-educated, polite, forceful, competent public servant.”

Once in Atlanta, Carter looked ahead to his tenure in Washington. He opposed the legislatures with a reorganization of state government, which he presented as necessary efficiency.

“He’s invested a lot of political capital in angering people by stealing their fiefdoms,” said Terry Coleman, a Carter ally in the Assembly.

Georgia law dictated that Carter could not succeed himself as governor. In Washington, it was not his choice to serve only one term.

Carter returned home in 1981, “humiliated by the voters” and “at least somewhat depressed,” Alter said, but found his most sustained success as an outside influencer when 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 maneuverings irritated his successors and Washington’s foreign policy. Carter criticized America’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 an outsider is to see him as someone who always understood the rules of the insider circle,” Roessner said. “He just didn’t always play by them.”