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Under the onslaught of its fame, the town behaved with mostly unruffled dignity and hospitality. But after a few patently successful attempts at informal mass communication—the telephone call-ins, the fireside chat in cardigan sweater—Jimmy retreated into his "nuclear" engineer's privacy, screened by a Georgia Mafia who lacked even the abrasive charm of basic good ole boys or the Kennedys' strident boyos. Nobody in Plains was exactly sure why Jimmy stayed away, but there were theories: possible embarrassment at Billy's high jinks, displeasure at the crude local commercialism, or maybe even advice from his pollsters to down-play the small-town Southern roots in favor of a homogenized national image. Certainly a home visit was a summons to pushing crowds, at least half newsmen; and resident family members found it increasingly impossible to appear downtown. (Miss Lillian: "They all wanted to touch me, and if there's anything I hate, it's being hugged and kissed by a woman.") But the peculiarly economical and decorous motions of a farming community, miles from any city, continued. And the splendid flat landscape of fields, thickets and wildlife was intact on all sides—briefly tolerant of the occasional trailer or other frail platform of human hope. Jimmy flew here election dawn to cast his own ballot, already informed of imminent failure; and in a greeting to his home-town supporters at the depot, the break in his voice seemed an understandable response to their continued loyalty in the face of so much bafflement, so many craven defections—"I've tried to honor my commitment to you."
What had that local commitment been? Was it different from his repeated blanket commitment never to lie to the country and to do his own best? If you had lived a great part of your life in so intimate a place, one where sustained deceit is impossible, wouldn't you have promised to make them proud of their share in you, their contribution to the shaping of your faculties? That was surely implicit.
And now, little more than a month after Jimmy's defeat, do townspeople feel the pride of four years ago, the fervent expectancy encouraged in his always fragile Irish tenor at his swearing-in: "That when my time as your President has ended, people might say this about our nation—that we had remembered the words of [the prophet] Micah and renewed our search for humility, mercy and justice ... that we had enabled our people to be proud of their own government once again"?
As I drive out from the Albany, Ga., airport in a rented car, 40 miles north toward Plains, the first clear fact is that the country hasn't changed—not the physical country, not hereabouts. The meticulously tended pecan groves stand on in the clean light; the well-grazed cows are still marching barnward in neatly spaced lines as if in rehearsal for their next state fair. The two crossroad towns, Leesburg and Smithville, show a little new paint on the old stores. But otherwise the stretch looks much as it must have all Jimmy Carter's life—no billboards alluding to his existence, no huckstering.