ATLANTA (AP) – Jimmy Carter is sometimes called a better former president than he was president.
Nodding to Carter’s decades of work as a globe-trotting humanitarian but with a glaring reminder of his landslide defeat in 1980, the backhanded compliment rankles Carter allies and, they say, the former president himself.
Yet now, 40 years removed from the White House, the most famous resident of Plains, Georgia, is riding a new wave of attention as biographers, filmmakers, climate activists and Carter’s fellow Democrats push to recast his presidential legacy, even as Republicans sometimes try to remind voters of the volatile economy and international affairs that doomed Carter to one term.
The renewed spotlight is especially significant for the broad swath of Americans too young to remember a presidency that spanned from 1977 to 1981. Sandwiched between the Watergate era of Richard Nixon and two terms of Ronald Reagan, Carter’s tenure came before Millennials or Generation Z voters were born and earlier than most of Generation X reached political awareness.
“People have always come up to tell me how much, my grandfather and my grandmother meant to them,” Jason Carter, 46, said in an interview. “They used to be my parents’ age or older. Now they’re younger than I am, sometimes much younger. It’s a remarkable thing.”