Electing Jimmy Carter.

• Author: Stark, Steven

A somewhat flawed book can still be valuable; so it goes with Patrick Anderson's Electing Jimmy Carter. Anderson was Carter's chief speech-writer during the 1976 campaign and has only now come out with his journal-memoir of that experience. (He says he misplaced the original manuscript for 16 years. Ironically, the delay might actually heighten interest in the book, given Carter's reemergence as a floating international mediator.) As someone who worked for Carter on issues during the 1976 primary campaign and knew Anderson briefly, I think the book does a far better job than anything I've seen of capturing the real day-to-day feel of a unique campaign in American political history.

After all, it's hard to recall another modern president who didn't have some significant exposure to Washington or the media and academic establishments in the years before he took office. (Even Bill Clinton had a Rhodes scholarship, went to Yale Law School, and spent much of the eighties in Pamela Harriman's Georgetown living room.) Yet, only six years before Carter stated campaigning for president, he had been nothing more than a state senator from an obscure region of Georgia where he had worked as a peanut farmer and businessman. Never has a modern political figure risen so far and so fast on the national scene. Anderson, a sometime-novelist, faithfully documents the exhilaration and the chaos as everyone who was anyone tried to claim a piece of Jimmy Carter. As Anderson implies, the only true parallel to the '76 Carter phenomenon may be something like the overnight rise of a rock band like the Beatles. Such a comparison suggests that politics had become an integral branch of popular culture--and thus subject to its many whims--long before Reagan hit Washington.

Though journalists tend to be far too casual about throwing around superlatives, it's safe to say that nothing like the Carter phenomenon will ever happen again. Americans have always yearned for outsiders to run their government, but the trauma of Watergate was so intense it encouraged voters to take a leap of faith with a candidate whose calling card was that he was completely untouched by the crises of the last decade--which also meant that he had never done much of anything of national significance. What's more, the Carter campaign took place in a media era that no longer exists--pre-USA Today, pre-cable, pre-wall-to-wall coverage. A Jimmy Carter today would quickly get discovered by the media and...