It worked.
For more click here: The Primary Experiment: Jimmy Who?
Forty years ago, when Jimmy Carter, a former one-term Georgia governor, was running for President, a headline in the Atlanta Constitution said, “Jimmy Who Is Running for What!?” Carter got little respect from the Democratic Party establishment, from the inhabitants of Georgetown, or from the influential Times columnist James Reston, who referred to the five-feet-nine candidate as “Wee Jimmy.” But Carter and his so-called Peanut Brigade had a plan: to spend a lot of time in Iowa, a state with a curious tradition—voting in highly personal caucuses—where George McGovern had, four years earlier, almost defeated the front-runner, Edmund Muskie. Although he finished ten points behind “uncommitted,” Carter won the state. Assessing Carter’s talent and endurance, a few political journalists guessed the future, and may have “invented” the Iowa caucuses by focusing on Carter and treating his victory as one of primary importance.
What has since become clear is that participants and observers at the time, in an unacknowledged, unplanned collaboration, were conducting a political experiment: to discover whether it was possible for a “Jimmy Who?” to run for President with little money (Carter and his volunteers often slept in the homes of supporters), no major backers, and a mostly skeptical press, and to do so while facing big-league talent, which then included the senators Henry (Scoop) Jackson, of Washington, and Birch Bayh, of Indiana; the former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey; and the thirty-eight-year-old governor of California, Jerry Brown. I met Carter at about that time, in upstate New York; he was there to meet local Party officials and, accompanied by an entourage of about two people, worked the room, saying again and again, “I’m Jimmy Carter, from Georgia!”
