Amber Roessner's "Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign"

Amber Roessner is associate professor in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America.

Roessner applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign, and reported the following:

On page 99 in [Chapter 5: Front-Running Dark Horse Encounters Resistance in the book] Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign, the reader will find an excerpt from conservative syndicated columnist George Will’s April 1, 1976 column entitled, “The Spirit that Moves Jimmy.” Within the column, Will wrote: “There is a Washington doctrine about the appropriate way to pray. Prayer is fine if done in moderation.... But Carter prays in church, and even while at home and while campaigning, for Pete’s sake.” Will asserted that this tendency was disconcerting to frontline reporters and potential voters not because it belied lack of “intellectual seriousness and emotional balance,” but because it meant Carter was unlike the average politician, who has “no spiritual process more complex than calculation—politicians who can be trusted to obey the First Commandment (revised): Thou shalt worship naught but the Gallup Poll.” Will and like-minded souls were distressed over the idea of a politician who “might occasionally doubt the axiom, vox popull, vox del (‘the voice of the people is the voice of God.’).” They did not consider that Carter was attuned to the voice of God and the people in 1976.

I will admit, just like the reporters following Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976, I did not place much faith in these claims, the page 99 test. However, the last full sentence of page 99 [After encountering deceptions of previous administrations and Carter’s truth-in-politics claims, Broder and his colleagues incisively inspected Carter’s campaign to vet his credibility, but his nuanced background and complex issues stances prompted them to construct Carter as an enigmatic, opportunistic politician.] does get to the very heart of a central theme in Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign –the negotiation of images at the center of what Time magazine hailed as one of the most astonishing political miracles in the nation’s history.

Featuring the signature tagline, “Jimmy Carter: A Leader, For a Change,” Jimmy Carter’s innovative (un)celebrity campaign capitalized on pairing chic, authentic images with two central themes—the New South leader’s commitment to the working man and the Washington outsider’s pledge for reform. “Jimmy Carter had struck a chord with the American people,” NBC News reporter Tom Brokaw recalled. “He was a Washington outsider, a church-going man, a farmer.” Carter’s campaign saturated news media with resonant images, but many journalists shared the consensus of Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Walter Mears: his “garment-bag politics [was a success] . . . but his staying power was in doubt.” You can read more about what Time magazine hailed as one of the most astonishing political miracles in the nation’s history in this book, which features the analysis of more than 25,000 primary source texts, that was more than a decade in the making.

Learn more about Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign at the Louisiana State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue