(December 31) Amid all the reminiscences this week about former President Jimmy Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at age 100, surprisingly little attention has focused on just how brilliant a campaign he ran to secure the Democratic nomination in 1976.
When the campaign began, Carter was the longest of long shots. He entered a crowded field filled with politicians of established national repute, while the overwhelming polling favorites, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Sen. Ted Kennedy, waited in the wings as undeclared candidates. Humphrey, who was the nominee in 1968 and earned the largest Democratic popular vote in 1972 (while losing badly, however, in the delegate count), clearly was interested in being “drafted” but never actually announced his campaign. Hundreds of delegates elected as “uncommitted,” though, were well understood to be for Humphrey, making his shadow campaign quite viable.
Carter couldn’t fashion himself as the sole favorite son of the South because repeat candidate George Wallace of Alabama was again in the field, with significant support. Carter couldn’t run as a leftist because nominee George McGovern, four years earlier, had shown by losing 49 states that hard leftism was electoral anathema. He couldn’t pretend to outcompete the defense hawk Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington among the Democratic Party’s still-significant wing of strongly anti-Communist union members. He didn’t have the personality to charm people nearly as effectively as did the witty liberal U.S. Rep. Mo Udall, who hailed from a long-prominent Democratic family. Nor could he match the public policy accomplishments of the attractive Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, who also was famous for pulling a badly injured Kennedy from the wreckage of a 1964 plane crash.
Carter and campaign strategist Hamilton Jordan, though, utilized five key political insights, all of them relatively new to presidential politics at the time…. [The full column is at this link.]
