“Unlucky President, Lucky Man” Some guy from Georgia, a former governor, spoke at my university in 1975. Jimmy Carter. He seemed nice enough, but a long shot for the presidency. It wouldn’t be the last time I misjudged a candidate’s chances. James Fallows worked for him as a speech writer and reflects on the legacy of a lucky man and unlucky president. Jimmy Carter has always been the same person: Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another. Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did. Carter was easy to admire but harder to work for. He was driven to succeed and always engaging. “No other candidate has gone from near-invisibility to the White House in so short a time,” Fallows writes. And a fusion of cultures from the Naval Academy to Bob Dylan to the Allman Brothers. “What if Carter’s trademark lines on the stump—I’ll never lie to you and We need a government as good as its people—had not been so tuned to the battered spirit of that moment, and had been received with sneers rather than support?” Carter’s timing was lucky, but…