Jack Carter, Jimmy’s Son, Is Cut From Different Cloth

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The New York Sun

LAS VEGAS — The offices for Jack Carter’s U.S. Senate campaign are situated in a nondescript single-story building some distance from the glitzy strip. An unassuming, bespectacled man, wearing a brown short-sleeve shirt festooned with an orange “Carter Nevada” sticker walks by a couple of young campaign workers. It’s no field aide or political organizer. It’s none other than the candidate himself, the eldest son of the 39th president.

Heavily favored to win his Democratic primary in two weeks, Mr. Carter hopes to face off against the one-term Republican incumbent, John Ensign. And, while Mr. Carter enjoys strong support from members of the left-leaning anti-war blog community that fueled the presidential campaign of Howard Dean and Ned Lamont’s race against Senator Lieberman, (in March, the Web site DailyKos posted a diary entry from President Carter on his son’s behalf), the Georgian-cum-Nevadan seems to be cut from slightly different cloth.

On Monday, he has just returned from a four-day, 11-town tour of the rural North. “It was one of those old fashioned, stump-speakin’, country kind of deals like old Americana, and I just loved it,” Mr. Carter exudes in a Plains patois. “I had a couple guys on a flatbed truck. One of them played guitar and the other one played the fiddle. We’d get to town an hour ahead of them and we’d go eat and tell people where we’re going to be. I play enough guitar so that when we start playing ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ I can come up and play the start with them and then I turn into a stump speech about 10 minutes.”

The jaunt, which took the campaign crew through such towns as Eureka, Tonopah, and Fernley, was somewhat unusual for a Democrat in Nevada politics.The bulk of the state’s voters, particularly the Democrats, reside in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its suburbs. At best, Democrats take 30% of the vote in the North. During the 2004 election, President Bush beat Senator Kerry 90% to 10% in some areas, according to Democratic political operatives. Mr. Carter thinks he can turn the usual political logic on its head.

“I’m from Plains, Georgia, 650 people,” Mr. Carter said. “Those are my people.”

Mr. Carter, who left the state to go on to a career of commodities investments in Chicago, Bermuda and elsewhere, says of his hoped-for appeal in the rural areas that are 14% of the state’s vote, “I am rural. There’s not a lot of difference between rural ranchers and miners and rural peanut farmers where I came from.”

Mr. Carter’s central message is more populist than partisan. His motto is the relatively benign,”I’m going to be Nevada’s voice in Washington.”He takes aim at the inside-the-Beltway bunch, saying government needs to taken back from the lobbyists. He repeatedly paints his opponent as being in lock-step with the Bush administration, but gives a more measured stance on the war than those of his on-line partisans. (Nevada, after all, has a fast growing population of veteran-retirees and lacks the reflexive dovishness of the eastern Bluetocracy.)

On the Iraq War, Mr. Carter says he favors a phased-pullout tied to actions of the Iraqi government — the more help from the Iraqi government, in other words, the longer we stay. If the Iraqi government can win the support of the major groups within the country for its platform within a certain period, “then it will ensure that we’ll have the stability of the country, the security of the country, then I’ll be willing to stay on and do something else,” he says. “If they don’t do that, I’m looking for any excuse to get out.”

His father, President Carter, who was known, among other things for his role for helping to broker the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, has emerged as a somewhat vocal critic of Israel. In May, he penned an op-ed in USA Today critical of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan for Israel’s borders as “not located on the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and Palestine.” He has been quiet during the recent conflict.

His son’s position is relatively unambiguous. “Hezbollah is totally wrong here. It is one of the areas I would try to stamp out. I have no problem with Israel going in there and taking them out,” says. He does provide one qualifier. The air campaign, unlike a ground effort, has generated a “public relations” problem. “Sometimes I think you just need to go hand-to-hand on ‘em,” he says.

While his comments criticizing the current administration are fully in step with the blogosphere, his foreign policy comments reflect a slightly different sensibility. “I’m not aiming to make the blog community happy,” he says, explaining that his daughter, Sarah R. Carter, maintains his blog and “interfaces” with the blog community.

For now, Mr. Carter is still a long shot. As of June 30, Mr. Ensign had $3.3 million of cash on hand to Mr. Carter’s $400,000. The most recent Zogby/Wall Street Journal poll showed Mr. Ensign leading Mr. Carter, 49.5% to 35%. For the first time, Mr. Ensign promises a strong Get Out the Vote effort and opened a field office in the voter-rich community of Henderson, just outside of Las Vegas.While other contests, such as the Connecticut Senate race, are garnering more attention, the spotlight will likely turn to Nevada in September. Nevada, which will hold a caucus in early 2008, has now supplanted New Hampshire as the second primary season contest, just after Iowa. President Carter will be here on June 29 as the keynote speaker for the Clark County Democratic Party’s Jefferson/Jackson Dinner. If Mr. Carter is viewed as having a chance against Mr. Ensign, many of the presumptive 2008 presidential candidates can be expected.

When the national candidates and press get here, they will find a smart, soft-spoken, rural, “moderate” politician running against Washington. But that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. In 1976, Jimmy Carter was a devout Southern Baptist, who had offered Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson’s name for nomination at his party’s 1972 political convention. “It’s time for someone like myself to make a drastic change in Washington,” Governor Carter had told a New Hampshire political gathering, according to Betty Glad’s “In Search of the Great White House”; a political advertisement criticized his congressional opponents for being a part of the Washington “bureaucracy.” He was politically adept and he caught the right political tide at the right time.

Ultimately, President Carter governed differently from the way he ran his 1976 campaign. His son says “if I can present myself as a reasonable alternative, somebody they’re not going to be afraid of, then, I think I’ll win.”The question is, what kind of senator would he be?

Mr. Gitell is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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