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Much of the party simply cannot take Carter at face value. Show-biz analogies are reached for to define him. His frequent references to love remind derisive critics of that 1930s musical Of Thee I Sing, in which Presidential Candidate Wintergreen croons that "love is sweeping the country." To others, Carter summons the image of the plastic politician in the film Nashville who broadcasts but never appears onscreen. Yet to many others, he is a believable leader with eclectic policies. Carter welcomes the ordeal of the primaries because he knows he must prove himself. "I want to be tested in the most severe way," he says. "I want the American people to understand my character, my weaknesses, the kind of person I am."
What kind of person is he? Carter has a deep sense of his roots. The first Scotch-Irish Carter arrived in Virginia before the Revolutionary War, and over the years the family moved farther south, to the southwestern Georgia hamlet of Plains (current population: 600). Cash-poor but land-rich, the Carters eventually accumulated some 2,000 acres of farm and woodland, raising peanuts and cotton. By Plains standards, they were patroons, leading citizens in a society keenly aware of hierarchy.
James Earl Carter Jr., the oldest of four, had a typical rural boyhood. When he was not at school he was working in the fields. His home lacked electricity and running water. Initiative was esteemed. At nine, he bought five bales of cotton with money he had saved from selling peanuts and stashed them away. A few years later, he sold them for enough profit to buy five old houses in Plains and became a landlord. The venture made him a confirmed capitalist.
Father James Earl Sr. was a resourceful farmer and small businessman, who was strict with his children and devoted to community mores, including racial segregation. But Carter's mother was something else: one of those doughty and durable women that the South produces among both races. It was "Miss Lillian" (pronounced locally Lee-yun) who taught her son to aim for something higher than what Plains could offer. A registered nurse, she supported the family during the Depression when farm prices plummeted. Instead of letting her children talk at mealtimes, she urged them to read at the table. She treated blacks with no less compassion than whites. She nursed them when they were ill, attended their funerals and tried to bring them into her church. "I've been called a nigger lover all my life," she told TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud recently in Plains. "I have even had eggs thrown at me." At 68, Miss Lillian joined the Peace Corps and worked as a nurse for two years in India. Today, at 78, she lives in Plains and cares for Jimmy's eight-year-old daughter Amy while the candidate and his wife are off campaigning.
It was largely because of her influence that Jimmy became the first Carter to finish high school. While he waited to fulfill his youthful dream of entering the Naval Academy, he spent two years at Georgia colleges. Finally, he was admitted to Annapolis, graduating in 1946. He married a hometown friend, Rosalynn Smith; they have four children: three sons, now in their 20s, and Amy.