Somewhere in my parents’ house (because nothing ever leaves my parents’ house), there is a copy of a slim paperback titled, Why Not the Best?

Okay, it’s not my parents’ house anymore, it’s mine. My son and his family live in it. And it’s likely that the book in question did leave, because my mother went on a binge of book donating late in life. She got so obsessive about it that she started donating books that belonged to other people. We had to have a talk.

This book was, I believe, a bestseller, and it introduced the world to a man named Jimmy Carter, just-departed Governor of Georgia. Richard Nixon had, only two years earlier, resigned the United States Presidency amidst scandal, and his elected Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, had preceded him in leaving office amidst scandal. So the Presidency fell upon a non-elected Vice President, Gerald Ford. By all accounts (including that of his opponent in the 1976 Presidential election, the aforementioned Jimmy Carter), Ford was a good and competent man, and, observed John Chancellor of NBC news, even a gifted athlete. Unfortunately, Jerry Ford had a habit of tripping and falling on camera. Jerry Ford pardoned a man that a lot of people hated then as much as many now hate the color orange. Saturday Night Live, already gearing itself up to be the sole source of political news for a large segment of the American electorate, had Ford portrayed by Chevy Chase as a dithering, absent-minded bumpkin.

The Presidency was not in good shape. The Democrats had last controlled the White House in the person of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, despite an ambitious and oft-lauded program of domestic reform–“The Great Society”–lost mass approval for his expansion of the unpopular Viet Nam War. The Democratic Party was in no better shape than was the G.O.P. vis a vis credibility of Presidential candidates.

Along came an outsider, a peanut farmer, a Southern Baptist, a Sunday School teacher, a Southern governor, who not only won the Democratic Party’s nomination (away from the third political scion of the Kennedy dynasty, no less) but triggered something of a cultural phenomenon. Jimmy Carter’s prominent teeth were caricatured far and wide. The antics of his brother Billy served to fill the cultural void left by the mass-cancellation of rural comedies like Green Acres and the Beverly Hillbillies a few years earlier. Indeed, a two-season rural sitcom, Carter Country, earned decent ratings for ABC starting in 1977.