From Carter to M.T.G.: What a Peach State Plummet

NYT OPINION: From Carter to M.T.G.: What a Peach State Plummet
By Maureen Dowd
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: February 25, 2023 at 02:00AM

From Hope of the South to Dope of the South.

When Jimmy Carter was president, I was a lowly clerk at The Washington Star. I saw him mostly through the eyes of Pat Oliphant, our brilliant, biting cartoonist. As Carter came to be seen as uncool and fumbling, Oliphant drew the president smaller and smaller in relation to his tormentors — including that killer rabbit.

It taught me an early lesson in the brutality of dwindling power.

Four decades later, I went one weekend to interview Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, in Plains, Ga., along with my friend Jerry Rafshoon, who was Carter’s media wizard.

I watched Carter teach Sunday school at the Baptist church his friends started in the 1970s, after his original church refused to integrate. Some in Plains, disdaining his views on integration, tried to boycott his peanut business, but most came back. “I had the best peanuts,” he told Rafshoon.

I sat with the former president as he celebrated his 93rd birthday with a concert; he asked the pianist to play “Imagine.” Wearing jeans and a belt with a big “JC” buckle, he showed me the four-poster walnut bed he slept in with Rosalynn, which he had carved himself.

The man was a marvel. The starchiness and righteousness were still there. He had not mellowed, thank God. He remained, to use the descriptor favored by one of his sons, intense. He still felt the sting of being dissed and held at a distance by his successors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/opinion/from-carter-to-mtg-what-a-peach-state-plummet.html