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Jody Powell, a true original

September 15, 2009 — In an age of instant communications and overnight campaigns, it’s hard to convey just what a revolution in political communications Jody Powell was instrumental in pulling off. But I’ll always think of it in terms of two picnics.

In 1975, I was assigned to cover the annual outdoor bash thrown by Phil Walden, the head of Capricorn Records. The big story that year was whether Greg Allman would show up with his new wife, Cher. While I was standing in the barbecue line, the guy behind me pointed out Jimmy Carter, who was standing a few feet from us with Walden, one of his early supporters. More people in that crowd recognized the record magnate, I think, than the former governor who had announced his campaign for the presidency, to much amusement in the state.

In those days simply being Southern was an automatic disqualifier for a presidential candidate. George Wallace was the only Southerner who was thought of in those terms, and then only as a protest candidate. The lack of any Washington experience also figured much larger than it did by the time Bill Clinton and George W. Bush came along.  In the early going, Carter’s candidacy seemed like more of a stunt than anything else: Showing up at a picnic for rock stars and record company reps might not seem like much these days, but in those days it was beyond the pale.

As a favor to Walden, Carter came back the following year, when he’d clinched the Democratic nomination. There were wall-to-wall celebrities – I met Andy Warhol that day – but only one who mattered. That was the first time I heard what I came to think of as the buzz of fame: the uninterrupted whir of dozens of cameras, in the days when they still had mechanical releases. It was the sound that followed the new nominee throughout his brief stop.

What Carter had pulled off in the span of that year was due to his unbounded confidence in himself and the confidence he inspired in others, especially that tight-knit group called the Georgia Mafia, at the center of which were Hamilton Jordan, who succumbed last year after a long battle with several different types of cancer and attendant diseases, and Powell, who dropped dead of a heart attack Monday.

“Everything was a collaboration with them, I think. They complemented each other. They were two originals,” said former Office of Management and Budget director Bert Lance, who had been the first to suggest to Carter he had a serious chance to become president.

Young and cocky, they were the first presidential advisors to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. Lee Atwater worked the other side of the street, but he took style points from Powell and Jordan.

Jordan assumed the role of the whiz-kid strategist, and Powell that of the sometimes smart-ass spokesman. But Jordan had a lot to do with Carter’s image, and Powell had a lot to do with his political strategy.

“He drove Jimmy around the state when he ran for governor, and I’m sure in those conversations they had then, they solved a lot of problems,” Lance said Monday.

 As Lance said, everything the two did was a collaboration: The cultivated image of a blue-jeaned governor who was down-home enough to teach Sunday School and cool enough to dig Bob Dylan, the elevation of the Iowa caucuses from a glorified straw poll to a major electoral crossroads, the talk show ju-jitsu which made being an outsider, inexperienced in the ways of Washington, the antidote to the cynicism bred by Watergate and Vietnam.

And the steady flow of good lines suitable for copy, delivered in Powell’s South Georgia drawl. Once during the Iowa campaign, he was asked why peanuts weren’t grown in that intensely agricultural state.

“If you put a peanut in dirt like this, it would die of excitement,” Powell responded.

He was fiercely loyal to his boss, and less afraid to express this in colorful terms than any of his predecessors. When another former governor attacked Carter in a press conference, Powell shot back with a line for the ages: “Being called a liar by Lester Maddox,” he said, “is like being called ugly by a frog.”

Last week, Robert Gibbs may well have wished that line had been forgotten so that he could use it again on Joe Wilson. But it was Powell’s line, and Powell’s style. He was an original.