John "Jack" Carter is the 59-year-old son of 39th president Jimmy Carter. Jack, it seems to us, shares Jimmy's looks, politics, and abiding virtue.
Jack Carter grew up working in his family's peanut warehouse, starting out earning 10 cents an hour, and debating the issues of the day with Jimmy, Rosalynn, and his three younger siblings -- Chip, Jeff, and Amy -- around the family dinner table. He attended Georgia Tech, Emory, and Georgia Southwestern for a while, but, the story goes, he succumbed to the temptations of the '60s counter-culture, which included playing a lot of poker and presumably, experimenting with recreational drugs. After two years, he dropped out of college, enlisted in the Navy, and spent another two years on a salvage ship off the coast of Vietnam, until he received a honorable discharge after admitting to smoking marijuana.
Carter returned to Georgia Tech and earned a degree in physics, then a law degree from the University of Georgia. His law career was shorter than his Navy career, and Carter soon got into the soybean business. This involved immersing himself in the commodities and futures markets and hedge funds, at which he got so good that in 1981, he moved to Chicago to work for the Chicago Board of Trade, advising banks on hedge funds, and Citibank, running his own hedge fund.
He also married his first wife, with whom he had two children, Jason and Sarah. He later got divorced, then married Elizabeth Sawyer in 1992. Together they moved to Bermuda, where they started their own investment company. In 2001, they moved to Las Vegas and found, like many of us have, that they were "always Nevadans, they just didn't know it till they moved here."
Today, he's campaigning on a fervent anti-Bush platform, insisting that presidential powers have run amok. On Iraq, he says, "I was against the invasion and the war before it started." He advocates personal freedoms and constitutional rights. He's pro-choice, pro-stem-cell research, pro-Israel's right to defend itself, and supports equal partnership rights for all couples (though he quibbles on the use of the word "marriage"). He’s also in favor of assimilating immigrants who are already here and supporting the kinds of alternative energy initiatives his father promoted long ago. All standard Democratic values.
He connects with rural voters, comes across as sincere, and in a poll released in late August, trailed his opponent, Republican John Ensign, by only three percentage points, 45% to 48%.
We can’t predict the outcome, of course, but it now looks like a good horse race. Nevada is traditionally Republican; the state went for George W. Bush both in 1996 and 2000. In addition, Jack Carter's opponent, incumbent John Ensign, is one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, and Representative Jim Gibbons is a staunch Republican. However, the big population base in Las Vegas has swung the state's political pendulum toward the Democratic side: Harry Reid is arguably the most powerful Democrat in the Senate and Shelly Berkley, Representative from Las Vegas, is a staunch liberal Democrat. So it's a mixed bag in terms of demographics.
But one thing's for sure: Jack Carter benefits enormously from the popularity of his father. Though Jimmy Carter stumbled through one term as president before being repudiated, since then he's become such a leading advocate of human rights and opponent of human suffering that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. This race will be interesting to watch over the next couple of months and should receive an abundance of national attention.
