Cousin Jimmy

This essay is an appreciation of the distinctive character and appeal of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth President of the United States. It begins with the author, a UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate, encountering the presidential candidate by accident in UNC’s student union, and continues with impressions of Carter through the years—as campaigner, as chief executive, as post-presidential humanitarian. In lively anecdotal prose, this piece explores their shared experiences, as southerners and Southern Baptists and lovers of poetry and music; it also explores the author’s experiences as a child obsessed with American presidents, and subsequently as a lifelong yellow-dog Democrat, all by way of trying to figure out: What was it about Carter that made him so different from politicians before and, especially, after him?