On the demise, maybe, of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, today’s New York Times has this.
It was an inauspicious debut, to say the least. In February 1975, a little-known governor from Georgia named Jimmy Carter showed up in Des Moines, Iowa, to kick off an improbable campaign for president. His team rented a hotel ballroom and bought enough food for a crowd of 200 people. Three showed up.
So Carter started working the streets and stores. Gerald Rafshoon, who was his media adviser, recalled the other day a story that later became famous. “Carter walks into a barbershop and says, ‘My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president,’ Rafshoon told me. “And the barber said, ‘Yeah, the boys and I were just laughing about that.'”
Today the self-deprecating humor is attributed to Jimmy Carter. As homage, it is appropriate in style and tenor to Carter, by far the greatest living ex-President of the United States. As history, it lacks a few things, including accuracy and chronology. Undoubtedly quite a few Times readers will thread references to Mo Udall, with whom the anecdote is usually connected.
Some recent books have connected it to John McCain. (See Paul Alexander’s Man of the People and Meghan McCain’s Bad Republican.)
McCain himself set the record straight on that one:
I have to recall my Morris Udall joke, who said – when – which has been stolen by every presidential candidate in history about Morris Udall going to a barber shop in Manchester, New Hampshire, and said: Hi, I’m Morris Udall from Arizona, and I’m running for president of the United States. And the barber said, yeah, we were just laughing about that this morning. (Laughter.) Thank you for your – (inaudible). (Laughter.)
Growing up, I used to read political books when I could get them. I had read that bit of self-deprecating humor and thought it came from Harry Truman or Adlai Stevenson, or Hubert Humphrey, or maybe Fred Harris. Sure enough, CBS News gives it to Truman.
It has also been attributed to Cece Andrus.
Actually, Moses probably scratched it off the tablet coming down from Sinai. He may not have had copy editors either.
