"I'm proud of my relationship with the Allman Brothers Band. They are good people, they are my friends, and anybody who wants a President who doesn't like music like this, and who doesn't like people who make music like this, should just simply vote for another man."
Cementing his image as the most chic of Baptist deacons from southern Georgia, Carter--with a certain amount of pride--told a small entourage of newmen following him to the dressing room about his seven-year-old daughter Amy, who attends a school back in Plains where she learns her daily lessons in a classroom with more black than white students from a black teacher. He greeted lead guitarist Betts with an earthy, "Goddam, how are you, man." Then Carter admired the red-and-white-knit-baseball-jersey-type shirt that TV hipster Geraldo Rivera was sporting--it read, "Win, Lose or Draw...The Allman Brothers-Jimmy Carter Benefit Concert."
(Ribera, in introducing Carter to the multitudes some 40 minutes later, explained that as a talk-show journalist, he couldn't come out and endorse any one candidate. "But that doesn't mean that I can't say what I think about this man. He's an honest, open, progressive politician. He stands for the things that you and I believe in--civil rights and housing and the environment. Jimmy Carter's like a breath of fresh air coming out of Georgia, and he's sweeping the country, people...")
UP ABOVE THE CONCERT bedlam in the skydeck of the Civic Center, around an elegant open bar in the Royal Roost hideaway and at hors d'oeuvre-covered tables seemingly secure behind amber one-way glass, just that prospect--Carter's potential for "sweeping the country"--was the talk of paunchy potential donors, paunchier Rhode Island political hacks and lean-with-ambition Carter staff aides alike.
In the last six weeks, the Carter campaign has crossed that critical threshold from nonentity and oblivion to cautious, firmly-grounded optimism--and greater access to power brokers, big money and press attention. "It's been so frustrating for so long, so hard to get people to take us seriously, that now, with front page stories in The New York Times and this, 10,000 people, it's hard to believe," Linda Sullivan, a year-long Carter worker from Chattanooga, Tenn., who is taking time off from Northwestern, said fervently between fashionable puffs on a long cigarette.
The front-page stories Sullivan was referring to described Carter's surprising strength at two state gatherings of Democratic Party activists. In Iowa, where the first convention delegates will be selected January 19, Carter received more than double the votes given any other candidate. In Florida's "Bicentennial Presidential Democratic convention" in mid-November, Carter garnered 697 votes, or more than two-thirds of all ballots cast in an informal tally. Wallace, the favorite in Florida, received only 57. "How important those votes were is open to debate," the chief political reporter for a national radio network told me sagely. "But there's no question that the organization, state by state, will be there for Carter."
Carter personally is warming to the spotlight. "This is my best-attended press conference ever," he told the 100 or so newsmen in the Royal Roost. Then, mingling with well-wishers at the bar (though, true to a deacon's demeanour, not imbibing himself), Carter looked to and fro and said excitedly, "There must be 500 people here. We only expected around 25 or so." And in some impromptu speech-making under the klieg lights with the mayors of Woonsocket and Saugus, chairmen of his Rhode Island campaign: "Last week, I predicted for the first time that on March 9 I'll beat George Wallace in Florida. Tonight I'm predicting that there will be only two of us left at Madison Square Garden. The convention won't be deadlocked. Your next president will be the Democratic nominee--a nuclear physicist who grows peanuts in Georgia."
But the spotlight shows signs of burning Carter. His attempts at attention-grabbing in the last week--telling a gathering of state governors that he would divert all revenue-sharing funds to cities, and announcing that in the event of another oil embargo, he would declare "economic war" on the Arab bloc--tend to belie his more thoughtful positions on fiscal and foreign policy. His rationale for the first proposal lies in his preference for putting welfare burdens onto the states--rather than the federal government--to prevent future New York City's. The motive for Carter's wishful thinking on the Mid-East is probably more pragmatic: he needs to take an increasingly tough stance in support of Israel to head off Scoop Jackson in Florida, the state where only Carter stepped forward to challenge Wallace.
On busing, too--the issue that Carter press secretary Jody Powell says "only Jimmy, with his strong civil rights record and direct experience with busing's shortcomings, can give leadership in"--Carter shows some signs of slippage. On the one hand, leading Georgia civil rights figures who have backed Carter in the past, such as Julian Bond and Maynard Jackson, have shown maverick impulses--Bond attacked Carter's hiring record in a speech in Boston last month (causing Mark Zweicher, a Business School student and Carter aide, to grumble in the back of the bus, "Julian's looking for some limelight, and we think he's on the Harris payrole anyway"), and rumor has it that Atlanta Mayor Jackson is leaning toward Sargent Shriver. On the other hand, the compromise desegregation plan Carter helped negotiate for Atlanta--substituting voluntary for mandatory busing--is probably unraveling under court tests, and his opposition to both "forced busing" and an anti-busing constitutional amendment will win him few votes on either side of the issue.
Still, the boy wonder from the Peach State who shook almost every hand in Georgia to steal the governor's chair five years ago has potential appeal in his freshness and "pragmatic liberalism." He touts himself as a businessman and manager who knifed the Georgia bureaucracy from 330 departments to 22. He promises to restrain monetary growth while stimulating employment with New Deal-ish measures and busting the trusts. He backs a strong but "streamlined" defense posture and calls for reducing both atomic weapons and power plants. He wouldn't abolish the CIA but would assume responsibility for its actions. He is adamant on Israel, but attributes its recent problems in the U.N. to the United States's "tragic" policies toward Third World nations.
"I tell you," Jim Gammil '75 said, pulling up the sleeves of his "Win, Lose or Draw" knit shirt and speaking with a touch of nervousness from his seat in the Royal Roost, insulated against the amplified roar of "Elizabeth Reed," "I didn't think I was going to work for a candidate--I thought I'd work for the Democratic National Committee again this year. But when Jimmy came to Kirkland House last spring, we ended up putting him up for the night. He slept on our fold-down couch. I spent two days with him. And I was sold."
As Gregg Allman, ensconced behind his mushroom-gilded organ, fended off a barrage of hats, scarves and requests with his arm and told the house below, "There's no use making requests, cuz we're gonna play every damn thing we know," Dan Hunter, a reporter for WAMH radio in Amherst, stared into the bottom of his beer. I took a seat next to him and a middle-aged couple from Woon-socket.
"They don't even know why they're here," growled Hunter, an agriculture major at Hampshire College who wants to return to an Iowa farm someday, pointing to the couple. "They told me they have no idea what Carter would mean to New England."
I asked Hunter what Carter would mean to farming. "Well, I talke to him, farmer-to-farmer, and you know what I found out? Chances are, one out of every ten bags of peanuts you buy is from one of his farms. That's what Jimmy Carter means to farming."