It was an inauspicious debut, to say the least. In February 1975, a little-known governor from Georgia named Jimmy Carter showed up in Des Moines, Iowa, to kick off an improbable campaign for president.
His team rented a hotel ballroom and bought enough food for a crowd of 200 people. So Carter started working the streets and stores.
“Carter walks into a barbershop and says, ‘My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president,’” Rafshoon told me.
“And the barber said, ‘Yeah, the boys and I were just laughing about that.’” From that modest start, however, something really big grew. Now, nearly a half-century later, the Iowa launchpad is about to close down.
With it will go the romance of the long-shot candidate who goes door to door in farm country to emerge from obscurity and reach the heights of American politics.
‘The Big Mo’
The Carter breakthrough in 1976 gave birth to generations of campaigns by little-known candidates hoping to replicate his stunning success.
Bush beat Ronald Reagan there in the 1980 Republican contest, he ecstatically declared that he had “the Big Mo,” or momentum, only to fall in New Hampshire afterward.
In 2008, Barack Obama upset the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, demonstrating that a Black candidate could win in a predominantly white state and giving credibility to his underestimated campaign.
The winnowing
On the Republican side, it has been less influential. In 2020, he finished in a humiliating fourth place when he was the presumed front-runner, though he ultimately bounced back.
South Carolina, his choice for opening contest in 2024, is where he turned around his 2020 campaign.
“When we decided to do it, it was one of the smartest things we did,” Rafshoon told me.
WORLD CUP
Round of 16: France beat Poland, 3-1, and England won 3-0 against Senegal.
A gift that goes back millenniums
A Roman gift guide for the celebration of Saturnalia by the first-century poet Martial included several texts on parchment, including works by Virgil and Cicero and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” ...
...In December 1851, just a few months into The Times’s existence, the paper declared a “season of Book-blossoms,” adding, “The Holidays act upon books like April upon trees.”
To this day, the holiday book-buying rush continues.