In campaign visit to Watertown, Jimmy Carter exhibited confidence, cordiality

California Gov. Jerry Brown, Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Arizona Congressman Mo Udall were among the others seeking the Democratic nomination for president.

But the tide was beginning to turn. A few days before his 1975 visit here, Mr. Carter won a Democratic straw poll in Florida, beating Pennsylvania Gov. Milton Sharp and Gov. Wallace, who came in second and third respectively. Mr. Carter received 697 of 1,035 total votes, the Associated Press reported. But the July 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City was looming, and Mr. Carter still faced an uphill climb for the top spot.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I will be the nominee,” Mr. Carter said in one of his Watertown stops, taped for a WWNY-TV program. “And there’s no doubt in my mind that I will be elected president.”

Bert Gault was the Watertown Daily Times reporter who covered Mr. Carter’s visits to the Holiday Inn (now Best Western) and to the studios of WWNY-TV. In his report, Mr. Gault, who retired from the Times as executive editor in July of 2013, said Mr. Carter had a casual approach to his prediction, as if talking about the weather.

“At that point, we had the middle of the road to minor candidates who would come to Watertown and make a media appearance,” Mr. Gault recalled earlier this week. “He was one of several.”

Mr. Carter’s bold prediction didn’t strike Mr. Gault as foretelling.

“That’s pretty standard,” he said. “No one is going to come in and go to a political rally and say, ‘Yeah — I don’t think I can get elected.”

But Mr. Carter’s bluster would come to fruition. When the delegate votes were tallied at the end of the 1976 Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden, Mr. Carter, former governor of Georgia, was nominated.

Paul J. Browne covered the convention for the Times. He reported that Evans Mills farmer Anne Martusewicz was one of the first to join the Carter slate from the 30th Congressional District. “That was in November of 1975,” Mr. Browne reported, “when friends of Mrs. Martusewicz scolded, ‘You’re not going to run for that dumb Southerner, are you?’”

“Less than a year before the election, here he was in Watertown as a kind of an afterthought for most people,” Mr. Gault recalled. “And less than a year later, he won the election for president of the United States. He did something remarkable in the following year.”

In the 1976 election, Mr. Carter defeated incumbent President Gerald R. Ford Jr.: 297 Electoral College votes to 240.

In Mr. Gault’s report, readers got a glimpse of Mr. Carter’s homespun manner that attracted a national audience, and votes:

- “Jimmy Carter doesn’t raise his voice. He speaks slowly, confidentially, his blue eyes twinkling, his face wrinkling into an extended smile.”

- “He can say ‘my daddy’ in one sentence and ‘my father’ in the next, mixing the homespun approach out of tiny Plains, Georgia, with the urbane and intellectual delivery of a man who helped develop the world’s first atomic submarines.”

- “He sprinkles his talk with the friendly qualifiers: ‘Maybe you won’t agree,’ ‘I probably shouldn’t say this in New York,’ ‘I don’t really know that much about this, as you may have detected by now.”

Local Democrats were left impressed, but noncommittal about Mr. Carter’s visit. They awaited “the senators, representatives, governors and others to come, asking for their votes.”

By the time Mr. Carter sought his failed reelection in 1980, the late Karl R. Burns, mayor of Watertown from 1976-1983, was literally flying high with his candidacy. Mr. Burns was among a group of five mayors from New York who traveled with President Carter on Air Force One during a day of October, 1980 campaign stops in the state. The mayor flew to Pittsburgh, where the president’s plane awaited him and the others.

“I withdrew the money from my own savings account,” the mayor told the Times. “That’s a lot of money, but I think it was worth it.”

According to Times files, aboard Air Force One, the president told Mr. Burns that he remembered being in Watertown in 1975 while campaigning as “Jimmy Who.”