{"id":14420,"date":"2023-02-26T19:55:13","date_gmt":"2023-02-27T03:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14420"},"modified":"2023-02-27T01:14:17","modified_gmt":"2023-02-27T09:14:17","slug":"from-carter-to-m-t-g-what-a-peach-state-plummet-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14420","title":{"rendered":"“From Carter to M.T.G.: What a Peach State Plummet”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Maureen Dowd<\/a>,\u00a0Opinion Columnist, Sunday Review, Feb. 26, 2023<\/span><\/p>\n

When Jimmy Carter was president, I was a lowly clerk at The Washington Star. I saw him mostly through the eyes of Pat Oliphant, our brilliant, biting cartoonist. As Carter came to be seen as uncool and fumbling, Oliphant drew the president smaller and smaller in relation to his tormentors \u2014 including<\/a> that killer rabbit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Credit…<\/span>Bettmann Archive; Jim Lo Scalzo\/EPA, via Shutterstock<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It taught me an early lesson in the brutality of dwindling power.<\/p>\n

Four decades later, I went one weekend to interview Carter and his wife, Rosalynn<\/a>, in Plains, Ga., along with my friend Jerry Rafshoon, who was Carter\u2019s media wizard.<\/p>\n

I watched Carter teach Sunday school at the Baptist church his friends started in the 1970s, after his original church refused to integrate<\/a>. Some in Plains, disdaining his views on integration, tried to boycott his peanut business, but most came back. \u201cI had the best peanuts,\u201d he told Rafshoon.<\/p>\n

I sat with the former president as he celebrated his 93rd birthday with a concert; he asked the pianist to play \u201cImagine.\u201d Wearing jeans and a belt with a big \u201cJC\u201d buckle, he showed me the four-poster walnut bed he slept in with Rosalynn, which he had carved himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The man was a marvel. The starchiness and righteousness were still there. He had not mellowed, thank God. He remained, to use the descriptor favored by one of his sons, intense. He still felt the sting of being dissed and held at a distance<\/a> by his successors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

As a postpresident, Carter\u2019s decency and honesty shone. Unlike Clinton and Obama, he didn\u2019t go Hollywood. Through the Carter Center, he worked tirelessly to eradicate diseases like Guinea worm and supervise elections in more than 100 countries.<\/p>\n

He cared so passionately about peace that he even offered to go on a mission for a Republican president with very different values, Donald Trump, to talk to Kim Jong-un in North Korea.<\/p>\n

Carter cared about building \u2014 furniture and relationships. The nasty new face of Georgia politics cares about dividing.<\/p>\n

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene followed up her furry catcalls to President Biden during the State of the Union by proposing secession.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe need a national divorce,\u201d she tweeted on Presidents\u2019 Day. \u201cWe need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat\u2019s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Georgia is purplish now, with two Democratic senators, as well as a governor and secretary of state willing to stand up to the Trump election lies that Greene helps spread. So it\u2019s not clear if some states would have to be \u2014 what\u2019s that word again? \u2014 segregated into blue and red bastions.<\/p>\n

Georgians could be proud of Carter, who worked prodigiously to bring peace to the Middle East. Now they have a congresswoman, a creepy confidante of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who talked gibberish about Jewish space lasers and called A.O.C. and the Squad the \u201cJihad Squad.\u201d Greene said Black people \u201care held slaves to the Democratic Party\u201d and labeled Black Lives Matter \u201cthe most powerful domestic terrorist organization within inside the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carter, a brainiac, is a former nuclear engineer with a soaring I.Q. Greene, a maniac, ranted to Tucker Carlson on Thursday about \u201cthis war against Russia in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Carter became governor in 1971, many hoped we had begun to move past the kind of hatred and racial struggles that defined the South in the 1950s and \u201960s. He placed Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s portrait in the State Capitol and said in his inaugural speech: \u201cI say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Time magazine hailed the New South on its cover, saying Carter had triumphed over the South\u2019s \u201cdemagogic past\u201d and Confederate ghosts. Now, thanks to the likes of Trump and Greene, we\u2019re back in the toxic soup.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarjorie Taylor Greene is following in the footsteps of racist old bigots like Lester Maddox and George Wallace,\u201d Rafshoon said.<\/p>\n

Greene is the apotheosis of those who love hating so much, they no longer have any interest in collaborating for the good of the country and the world. Carter is the apotheosis of the mantra \u201cWe\u2019re better than this.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cJimmy Carter represents all that is good and decent in public life,\u201d said Jonathan Alter, the author of \u201cHis Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.\u201d \u201cAnd Marjorie Taylor Greene represents all that is sinister and despicable in public life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alter has been fielding calls from around the world from people writing stories about Carter since the 98-year-old started hospice a week ago. (Those who know Carter joke that he\u2019s so competitive, he has no doubt asked his doctor the record for hospice care, so he can break it and add to his list of accomplishments.) He wanted to be at home with his wife of 76 years, Rosie, as he calls her. The two were introduced when Carter was a toddler by his mother, Miss Lillian, a nurse, a couple of days after she delivered Rosalynn, which sort of makes them sweethearts for 95 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s en route to becoming an American Gandhi,\u201d Alter said. \u201cHe went from obscurity and zero percent in the polls to lead an epic American life by offering a positive, inspirational message.\u201d A message that is a rebuke, Alter said, \u201cto what is twisted and wrong about MAGA America.\u201d<\/p>\n

So who do we want to be? Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jimmy Carter? Destroyers or builders?<\/p>\n

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maureen Dowd,\u00a0Opinion Columnist, Sunday Review, Feb. 26, 2023 When Jimmy Carter was president, I was a lowly clerk at The Washington Star. I saw him mostly through the eyes of Pat Oliphant, our brilliant, biting cartoonist. As Carter came to be seen as uncool and fumbling, Oliphant drew the president smaller and smaller in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14420"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14420"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14424,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14420\/revisions\/14424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}