EXCLUSIVE: Every day that it continues, Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency sets a new record.
In hospice care now for over a year, the former president has held the record for the longest ex-presidency for more than a decade.
Two generations, the millennials and Generation Z, have come of age since he left the White House in 1981.
And James Earl Carter Jr. – a man who, when he told his mother in the 1970s, “Mama, I’m going to run for president,” was met with the nonplussed response, “President of what?” – has transformed the post-presidency into an institution with a power and purpose of its own.
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The 39th president was young when he left office, at just 56 years old. Before he ran for high office, few Americans outside of Georgia had heard of Jimmy Carter, let alone thought of him as commander in chief.
The New York Times didn’t know what to make of him, and called him either a “Southern-style Kennedy” or “just another Democratic dark horse.”
When Gallup commissioned a survey for a list of possible presidential candidates for 1976, respondents came up with 31 contenders.
Carter’s name wasn’t on the list.
His breakout was in the Iowa Caucuses, where he came in a surprise second place, behind “Uncommitted.”
With America still reeling from the Arab oil embargo, Vietnam War and political scandals, a Southern governor with a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. hanging in his Atlanta office, an…
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