Carter one of best role models of those who've held office

For most of my life I thought the first president I had ever voted for was Jimmy Carter. When I got to thinking about it last week, I did the math and figured out that fact about me was stored incorrectly in my memory.

I think I would have voted for him if I had been born six months earlier because he was a peanut farmer and I had lived on a peanut farm myself. I also liked the fact that he didn’t speak like other politicians and he seemed genuine.

I do remember that campaign well. The Democrats had a fit when he won the Democratic Primary. Everyone assumed he would lose but instead won by a landslide. In the general election he took on Gerald Ford, who had assumed the job of president when Richard Nixon was forced out by Watergate. Political pundits thought Carter would get trounced but they misjudged the bad taste that Watergate left in our mouths. A political outsider was what we were looking for and grinning Jimmy Carter filled the bill.

I remember I first registered as Independent when I turned 18. I grew up at a time when Roosevelt County politics was overwhelmingly Democrat and had been since Roosevelt’s New Deal and the coming of rural electrification to our farms. My parents told me if you don’t register as a Democrat you won’t be able to vote for anyone in the primary since there were no Republicans on the ballot locally.

I thought good ol’ Jimmy was a pretty good guy. He worked hard and told us how it was and not what we wanted to hear. Then the event that shaped my political choices even more than Watergate occurred halfway through Carter’s presidency. Iranian students in Tehran stormed the U.S. Embassy in Iran seizing 50 hostages.

We had propped up the Shah of Iran for years and when Carter came into office he was seen as a bit of a dove where foreign policy was concerned and the hostage crisis came about because of that perception.

My image of Jimmy Carter plummeted the night we learned how horribly wrong a rescue mission went in the deserts of the Middle East. I changed to Republican before the next presidential election and voted for Ronald Reagan.

While I didn’t support Carter during the second half of his presidency, I do believe he is probably the best role model, other than maybe George Washington, to hold the office and he truly lived his life as a Christian before anything. The man believed in service and after leaving Washington he went home to Georgia and continued his service to his fellow man.

We most remember his service to Habitat for Humanity and that’s where I had my closest brush with the 39th president. One day in Montrose, Colo., I’m sitting at the stoplight downtown when a couple of black Secret Service-like Suburbans pulled up next to me. I couldn’t see who was inside, but later that night I found out Carter was in Crested Butte that day to work on a project and plea for pledges. If he had rolled down his window and grinned at me I would have told him I almost voted for him.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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