Carter avoids setting impossibly high standard, keeps Bert Lance.

Bert was a personal friend of Carter, with good practical wisdom to balance Jimmy's more cerebral approach.

As head of a major bank in Georgia, Bert was criticized in '77 for using the bank's jet to attend football games. He was also criticized for arranging loans for friends of bank officers and employees. This one's potentially more serious. Maybe it hinges on how far outside the norm the friends are as far as having conventional credit ratings. If it's close then you can argue that your personal knowledge of the person's good character, etc, etc.

So, what if Carter basically pulls a Bill Belichick?

He says, I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation. And he keeps Bert Lance as long as he reasonably can.
 
Alright, let's say while Jimmy is campaigning in Iowa in '75, he happens to talks with a physician who comments that a lot of it is how good your B game is, that is, how good a job do you do with the patient with whom you connect least well.

And, Jimmy likes this! And he riffs on it. For example, it's not always about being a great listener. Sometimes, just being a good enough listener is plenty good enough. That is, just a solid steady eddie B game and correcting mistakes as you go along.

And on the economy and more good jobs, it's not primarily about big master strokes. It's more about doing a number of small and medium things which all together will make a difference. It's about adapting as you go along and, yes, doing this rather sloppily which is better than various traps of perfectionism.

=====

This would have been better than Jimmy promising he will never lie to us the American people. Which is too much. Which is a promise he may not always be able to keep.
 
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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/jimmy-carter-iowa-caucuses/426729/

How Jimmy Carter Revolutionized the Iowa Caucuses

" . . . During one early morning interview on a local television station, Carter embraced the politics of personality when he dressed up in an apron and chef hat to show to audiences how he liked to cook fillets of fish. He talked about the way he would slice the fish and how he liked to marinate them overnight. The appearance was a smash hit. . . "
People liked Jimmy.

He didn't need to overtry.
 
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1979/05/the-passionless-presidency/308516/

The Passionless Presidency
The Atlantic, James Fallows, May '79.

' . . . I came to think that Carter believes fifty things, but no one thing. He holds explicit, thorough positions on every issue under the sun, but he has no large view of the relations between them, no line indicating which goals (reducing unemployment? human rights?) will take precedence over which (inflation control? a SALT treaty?) when the goals conflict. Spelling out these choices makes the difference between a position and a philosophy, but it is an act foreign to Carter's mind. . . . . During the campaign, he used to say that our nation was the first to provide "complete compatability" between liberty and equality. This pained me more than anything else he said. I sent him notes and told him in person that these two terms were like city and country, heaven and hell: the tensions between them shape much of American society. But Carter continued to make the same statement, and I realized it was not because he was vulgarizing his ideas for the crowd, but because he genuinely believed what he said.

'Carter thinks in lists, not arguments; as long as items are there, their order does not matter, nor does the hierarchy among them. Whenever he gave us an outline for a speech, it would consist of six or seven subjects ("inflation," "need to fight waste") rather than a theme or tone. His Inaugural address, which he wrote almost entirely by himself, is an illustration of this approach and a prime example of his style. Whenever he edited a speech, he did so to cut out the explanatory portions and add "meat" in the form of a list of topics. . . '
James Fallows was Carter's main speechwriter until he resigned Nov. '78.
 
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