It is traditional for candidates to begin their advertising campaigns with biographical ads. These positive commercials frame their life stories in the best possible light, attempting to link their personal histories to their political goals. The focus on personality was especially important in the 1976 election, which took place less than two years after the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Many voters were cynical about their government, and character became a more significant factor than individual issues. Political historian Michael Barone said that “the 1976 election is probably unique in American history as one in which the focus of attention was not on the performance of the incumbent President but rather on the character of the challenger.” This five-minute biographical ad for Governor Jimmy Carter accomplishes a lot: it establishes Carter as a fresh-faced outsider with roots in small-town America and experience as a Naval officer, and as a peanut farmer who made working people rather than special interests his priority as Governor of Georgia. From its modest opening, with the candidate seen in a denim work shirt on a farm, to its uplifting ending, where Carter is shown immediately after a shot of Mount Rushmore, the ad creates an emotionally compelling case for Carter as the candidate who can create a “new era” in America.

Museum of the Moving Image
The Living Room Candidate
"Bio," Carter, 1976

(Upbeat background music)

MALE NARRATOR: 1976. Across our land a new beginning is under way, led by a man whose roots are founded in the American tradition.

(Acoustic folk music)

[TEXT: OCTOBER 1924]

[TEXT: U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY]

JIMMY CARTER: My folks have been farmers in Georgia for more than 200 years and we've been living around here for, oh, 150 years.

LILLIAN CARTER: We had to work every afternoon. He didn't, couldn't, didn't have a chance to run around. We didn't have a car phone, and he had to come home every afternoon and work, work real hard out in the field.

JIMMY CARTER: Everybody in the family loved each other. We had to work together. We didn't recognize hardships. We thought we were having a great life, and I think we probably were, and it was a tight-knit family life bound together with love.

LILLIAN CARTER: I never did, I never did spank him. He was - Jim, I never did spank. I might have given you a little licking in passing, but, I mean, a real whipping, I never gave him one. That was, I left that with his father.

JIMMY CARTER: Although I've had a good chance to get an education as an engineer and a scientist, nobody in my family before my generation ever had a chance to finish high school. We've always worked for a living. We know what it means to work.

MALE NARRATOR: And it was the working people, not the special interests, that Jimmy Carter represented as governor of the largest state east of the Mississippi. He gave them an administration responsive to their needs and proved that an efficient and well-managed government can be achieved.

(fireworks)

MALE NARRATOR: Jimmy Carter's candidacy is truly of the people and for the people. He spent the last twenty-two months listening, discussing, sharing his concern.

ROSALYNN CARTER: People ask me every day, "How can you stand for your husband to be in politics, and everybody know everything you do?" And I just tell them that we were born and raised and still live in Plains, Georgia. It has a population of 683, and everybody has always known everything I did.

(group laughter)

And Jimmy has never had any hint of scandal in his personal or his public life. I really believe he can restore that honesty, integrity, openness, confidence in government that we so sorely need in our country today. I think he'll be a great President.

JIMMY CARTER: I have a vision of America, a vision that has grown and ripened as I've traveled and talked and listened and learned and gotten to know the people of this country.

(background music)

I see an America poised, not only at the beginning of a new century, but at the brink of a long, new era of more effective, and efficient, and sensitive and competent government. I see an America that has turned away from scandals and corruption. I see an American President who governs with vigor and with vision, and affirmative leadership, a President who is not isolated from our people, but a President who feels your pain and who shares your dreams. I see an America on the move again, united, its wounds healed, an America entering its third century, with confidence and competence and compassion, an America that lives up to the majesty of its Constitution and the simple decency of its people. This is my vision of America. I hope you share it, and I hope you will help me fight for it.

MALE NARRATOR: On November 2nd vote for Jimmy Carter.

"Bio," 1976 Democratic Presidential Campaign Committee, Inc., 1976

Maker: Gerald Rafshoon

From Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012.
www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/bio (accessed December 21, 2024).

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