THE CANDIDATE: How Southern Is He?

I am a Southerner and an American.

—Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best?

The priorities seem implicit in the autobiography that Carter wrote as he set out on his presidential quest. Yet despite his credentials—boyhood in and manhood return to South Georgia, a couple of terms in the state legislature, the governorship—how much of a Southern stamp does Carter really have? After all, he left Georgia at 18 for the U.S. Naval Academy, was exposed there to everything from ballroom dancing to naval strategy, followed that with windows on the non-Southern world in...