Happy 100th Birthday, Jimmy Carter

Why not the best? We had him and let him go.

I met Jimmy Carter once, and embarrassed myself.

Of course, I was only 16, a high school junior, and we do this sort of thing.

Then-Gov. Jimmy Carter was making an appearance at FarmFest, somewhere in Southern Minnesota—I think it was Faribault, home of my dad’s beloved Gopher Shooter’s Supply, which, if it’s still in existence, probably counts Gov. Tim Walz as a loyal customer.

I went down with some of my high school journalist colleagues working diligently for the Mounds View High School Viewer, under the able tutelage of Peggy Mann Rinehart, who seemed about 3 years younger than we were. I think she’s a very kicky early seventies, and worked on a daily newspaper in New Hampshire in 1968. Jim Kelly went, I remember that. He was ME and Editorial Page Editor at the Honolulu Advertiser later in his career. Keith Hansen might have gone as well. Maybe Chuck Joseph went, too. There’s a photo, somewhere, but I can’t find it, along with my high school yearbook.

Before Carter spoke, I saw his press secretary, Jody Powell, carrying chairs across the muck of the cornfield. I called out to him, and he smiled, waved a chair, and continued on.

I don’t remember much if anything Carter said, but he had to be tired. I don’t recall if Mondale was with him, either. Normally I remember things like this, but I just remember my mistake with Jimmy Carter. I do think Hubert Humphrey was there, too, which led me to say to Jimmy Carter, “Hubert for Majority Leader,” I shook his hand. He seemed rather diminutive to me, and he was blotchy, probably from all the Holiday Inn dining these poor people have to subsist on while they vie for Leader of the Free World.

Carter patiently responded, “It’s up to the Senate to do that.”

I winced. Of course it’s up to the Senate.

And that was the only time I spoke to Jimmy Carter.

I was a Carter fan, even as HHH was trying to decide whether or not to run again. He was only 65, which is teenaged compared to some of our recent presidential candidates. I was very excited by the prospect of taking back the White House after Watergate, where normal GOP crooks did their thing in the open. Now they’ve elevated their crookedness to shameless hawking.

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I started my career drawing under Jimmy Carter, and by 1978, I was of two minds about him.

The first line of thinking was, why aren’t people responding to him the way I thought they should. The second line of thinking was, well, he’s not being very well-served by some of his people, but, again, in retrospect and having some experience with the old Washington, D.C. political culture myself, he probably didn’t have a chance because, for all his brains, he wasn’t a schmoozer. He felt that his arguments were solid on the merits, and why should he have to kiss some Ohio congressman’s ass?

That ain’t how it works in D.C..

God knows how it works now. You tell me.

I loved Carter so much I recorded his Democratic acceptance speech on my 8 track and listened to it any number of times in my basement bedroom in Minnesota.

CLUNK—'“...a country as good and decent as are the American people…”—CLUNK.

Fast forward to Carter’s debate performance, which I do vividly remember thinking he had won. I brushed off Ronald Reagan’s cornball lines, and I shouldn’t have.

My normally moderate Democratic father, a former Ike guy, was going to vote for Reagan because, he said, he had lowered the thermostats at the Department of Agriculture building (built with the New Deal-era blueprints for Ft. Leavenworth prison) where he toiled for the U.S. Forest Service. He also detested the Deputy Agriculture Secretary, Carol Tucker Foreman, for some reason.

I remember the day after Reagan won, and having precisely the same feeling as I did when Trump won. Sick. Like, how the hell could anyone fall for this B Movie Actor/ Phony? And: it’s all over.

Little did I know it could get worse. Much, much worse.

Now most of the Reagan guys are lined up behind Harris.

To me, Carter was so far ahead of his time that the dominant D.C. Swamp Things couldn’t accept that solar panels were good, or that maybe we should should look at fossil fuels. Or, you know, vote on things based on the merits.

Had we did then what Carter suggested, climate might be a very different issue now.

In my work, I was never cruel to Carter, but most of other cartoonists I admired, like Jeff MacNelly and Pat Oliphant, were brutal. Although I liked Jeff personally very much, and thought him the best cartoonist working at the time, his hatred seemed so out of character for him, for I later saw him as a very open man who cared about people and his profession. He was a Reagan guy, too, and even as Jeff was truly a preppy blue blood (his father was publisher of the Saturday Evening Post), you could see that later, there was more humanity in his later work. He didn’t like Quayle, I remember.

As a kind of editorial nihilist, Oliphant hated everyone, so that was expected.

As Carter found his place after a massive defeat, he became a sort of prophet, his stature growing until he became perhaps the most lionized former living president ever. I doubt Jefferson and Adams were as popular.

Carter’s good works are ubiquitous, from being a human rights and voting monitor to helping to eradicate African diseases, but he never became much of a Democratic Party force, because he wasn’t of the machine. He won despite the machine. Carter was also deeply involved in Habitat for Humanity. Oh, and he taught Sunday School at his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia.

He didn’t go around charging a million bucks for a corporate speech. He just went back to be as much of a regular person as a man who had served as the 39th president could be.

He worked endlessly in his campaigning; his sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, the evangelist, complained about having to get up so early in Iowa, where Carter put this little political caucus front and center until the last cycle.

Carter responded, “Honey, I can get up at 6 and win, or I can sleep in and get my ass whipped”.

Epic dad statement.

The odd thing about Carter in 1976 was that he carried 11 of the 13 Confederate (traitorous) states, including Texas.

Texas.

Oh, and he was pro-life, if I recall correctly.

When Ted Kennedy got into the race, even as I was a Kennedy person, I gave no thought to voting for him—on character, because of Chappaquiddick, OK?—and voted for Jimmy Carter, who earned my first presidential vote. Nor did I vote for Kennedy in the 1980 Minnesota Precinct Caucuses, which are now not anything at all.

Kennedy ran a terrible campaign, but he did have a point: the party had definitely moved more centrist in four years. But Kennedy’s campaign was all about Carter’s slighting of him throughout his presidency, a key political fail. Jonathan Alter has an excellent Carter biography out, and I strongly recommend it. I hear Kai Bird’s is great, too.

A friend of mine who owned a fishing club in Oregon invited me to fish with Carter once in 1991. For some reason, I think it was a kid thing, I couldn’t go, and I have to say this is the dumbest decision I have ever made in my adult life.

I was asked to do a cartoon for him to present at this club, so I did. I was told he liked the cartoon, which was called, “Jimmy Carter’s Fly Box”. It featured flies pertinent to his staff, and one was called “Costanza Midge”, after Midge Costanza, one of his domestic policy aides. If you’re a fly fisherman, you will be laughing about my incredible cleverness. If not, well, you’re right. It’s obscure as hell.

Soon after his visit, I got a handwritten note from President Carter:

“To Jack Ohman—Your fishing cartoons & those on my staff are great! The ones on me & Harding remind me of the White House years. Maybe sometime we can fish together. Jimmy Carter”

I have often wondered what a thirty year old me would have said to Jimmy Carter on a fishing trip we never took. I am sure that I was in over my head and waders then, and maybe It’s just as well that we didn’t.

I wish I could go with him now.

I am told reliably that the cartoon I drew for him hangs in his cabin on Turniptown Creek in Georgia, where he fished and made furniture from local wood.

This country is better for having Jimmy Carter not just as president, but as a human and a citizen. Carter, along with Jefferson and few others, was definitely our smartest president, and, like many smart people, they seem out of place in their time. Carter never served on corporate boards after his presidency, either. He just wrote books to make money, an honest living.

Carter said, quoting Minnesota’s own Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing, we were a country busy being born, not busy dying.

Carter has said he wanted to live long enough to vote for the first black woman president of the United States, and he did. I am not sure whether we’re busy being born now, but we’re flirting with dying.

I’m hoping that Carter’s lesson in his life will keep us all going after he’s left us: selfless service, faith, courage, stamina, and perseverance.

I am sure that Carter never saw himself as a future president in the way that a Bill Clinton did. He was just called to it in a different way.

Carter’s sunset has lasted for years now, and we’ve written his obituary more than once since 2018. Several cartoonists have obituary cartoons ready to go, and they’ve been ready to go for awhile.

I couldn’t bear the thought of doing that. I did one when he was diagnosed (nine years ago) with malignant melanoma. Here it is:

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I don’t know what I’ll draw when President Carter passes.

I don’t want to think about that. I’ll think about this now:

I’ll think about me as a young political aide, driving in his motorcade as fast as the Minnesota State troopers let me.

I’ll think about him gamely speaking to a 1978 DFL rally I left the parked motorcade to watch, and getting yelled at by the head of the Secret Service detail, Jack Fox.

I’ll think about seeing him with Hubert Humphrey on the steps of Air Force One, waving from 26000, which was John F. Kennedy’s jet.

I’ll think about him saving millions of people’s lives.

But now, I will think about celebrating his birthday, who shares a birthday with my beloved baby brother (whom we called Jimmy as a child), who turns 60 today. Both great humans.

Happy Birthday, Jimmy! And Jimmy!