In Jimmy Carter’s hometown, tourists buy peanut butter ice cream and peanut-shaped earrings, vintage Carter campaign buttons and bobblehead dolls. They can even find Carter live in person, teaching Sunday school at the local Baptist church.
As mayor of the tiny Georgia town of Plains, L.E. “Boze” Godwin III is a Republican who presides over a living shrineJust behind City Hall, the old train depot that operated as Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign headquarters is a museum festooned with a large 1970s banner proclaiming “Jimmy Carter! for president.
“The world may look at him as President Carter, but I look at him as a friend,” said Godwin, 76, a husky, soft-spoken pharmacist who has served as mayor for 36 years and looked up to Carter even longer. “I admire him very much for his accomplishments.” After sleeping in their cars overnight, those who want to see President Carter at his church have to wait in line to be searched by the Secret Service before entering.“He’s just a love,” said Godwin’s wife, Betty, a whirling 75-year-old social butterfly who organizes Carter’s birthday parties.
“If it weren’t for him, there would probably be no Plains,” said Bobby Salter, 80, from his downtown peanut and candy shop. “Like all these old Southern towns, it would be all done dried up.” “Things are better than they were, but we still got a long way to go,” Jackson said. “We got a devil for a president. Ew, he got a mouth on him!”
His progressive evangelism that focused on the poor and minorities met a backlash, part of a broader response to the surge of 1960s and ‘70s liberalism. In 1980, Ronald Reagan wrested the South away from Carter and the Democrats, casting the poor as “welfare queens” and cutting taxes on the rich, ushering in 12 years of Republican control of the White House and the rise of the religious right.
In his latest class at the red-brick chapel earlier this month, Carter noted he was “absolutely and completely at ease with death” and went on to offer the congregation a simple prescription for making America a better country.
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