Jason Carter vividly recalls the frustration he felt volunteering in the Peace Corps in South Africa at the turn of the century.
He spent two years there in his early 20s, helping rural black schools recover from decades of neglect under apartheid. Many students dreamed of blue-collar jobs. Their educators deferred to Carter or asked him for advice on everything from drum majorette uniforms to math. They figured he knew better because he was white, though he didn’t.
Writing about his experience in his 2002 memoir “Power Lines,” Carter blamed what he saw on the lingering effects of apartheid. Finally, he blurted out to a school principal who was asking him how to fix her car: “Look! I don’t know. White people don’t know everything!”
For Carter, the experience in South Africa brought into sharp focus the power of education to transform lives, for good or bad. A grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, he is now running on an education-focused platform in a tight race for governor. If he defeats Republican Gov. Nathan Deal on Nov. 4, he will be the first Democrat to win the Georgia Governor’s Mansion since Roy Barnes did in 1998. Georgia is a deep red state — Republicans hold all of its statewide offices — but recent polls show the gubernatorial race is close.
The centerpiece of Carter’s campaign is a proposal to carve out a separate state education budget and significantly increase school funding by cutting other spending and more vigorously pursuing tax dodgers. Boost education, he says, and economic success will follow.
“Government matters,” Carter said in a recent interview at his Atlanta campaign office. “And it is either going to be terribly harmful like it was in South Africa, or you are going to educate people and unlock their potential. … What I want from my community is to maximize the human potential that is out there.”
Experience debated
After he wrote his book, Carter went to the University of Georgia to study for his law degree. While at UGA he was appointed to the executive committee of the Georgia Democratic Party. He helped launch several efforts to bring younger people into the party, including the Red Clay Democrats. He later went to work as an attorney for Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, a prominent Atlanta law firm. He also did pro bono work challenging Georgia’s voter ID laws, earning him an award from the Anti-Defamation League for “efforts to protect voting rights.”
After state Sen. David Adelman was named the U.S. ambassador to Singapore in 2010, Carter prevailed in a special election for the heavily Democratic east Atlanta seat. Deal is now taking aim at Carter’s relative short time in public office and even his age — Carter is 39 — calling him “young and inexperienced.” Now 72, the governor has served in public office for decades, including as a congressman, prosecutor, judge and state senator.
Carter dismissed Deal’s attack, rattling off a list of Georgia governors who were younger than him when they took office. Among them was Carl Sanders, who was 37 when he was elected Georgia’s governor in 1962.
“I don’t think there is an age requirement,” Carter said. “The kind of experience you get in Washington and that (Deal) has in spades has been unhelpful. And I think that ultimately the question is: What kind of a leader are you and what is your vision for the future?”
Deal’s campaign has also blasted Carter’s tenure in the state Senate, accusing him of batting “.000 as a legislator.”
“You have never passed a bill, never offered an amendment to many of the bills you now are criticizing,” Deal told Carter this month during a televised debate in Atlanta. “Why should Georgians vote for you with this absolute lack of leadership?”
Carter’s campaign has responded to such attacks by releasing a list of 21 bills he co-sponsored and that Deal signed into law. They include bipartisan measures to create courts for the mentally ill and to require the governor to use zero-based budgeting as a way to eliminate waste. Carter was the chief sponsor for 11 other bills. Some were aimed at overhauling Georgia’s HOPE scholarship, the state’s scandal-plagued ethics commission and the political redistricting process. The Republican-controlled Legislature didn’t approve those measures. But Carter said Deal co-opted some ideas he and other Democrats championed, including efforts to expand access to HOPE.
“He is running this Washington-style partisan regime,” Carter said. “So to criticize me for not having passed legislation in his hyperpartisan regime is baseless.”
Carter has won the respect of fellow legislators with his ability to debate complex legislation, for not resting on his grandfather’s laurels and for being heavily involved in the Senate Democratic Caucus, said Senate Minority Whip Vincent Fort of Atlanta.
“He could have just said: ‘I’m a big shot. I’ve got a great name. I’m not going to those tedious (caucus) meetings where we talk about the minutia of legislation and strategy,’” said Fort, who is supporting Carter for governor. “I’ll be honest with you, I was surprised and really gratified that he would come on a regular, consistent basis — but not just come to say that he is there, but be engaged and be involved.”
Republican state Sen. Fran Millar of Dunwoody said Carter is a smart and likable person with a “very bright future in politics.” But like Deal, Millar described Carter as unproven.
“If you want to use an analogy, take President Obama, who was a backbencher in the Illinois Senate – didn’t accomplish a whole lot,” said Millar, who is supporting Deal for governor. “Well, Jason Carter has been a backbencher in the Georgia Senate. You have got a known commodity with proven results vs. a very unknown, untested, untried alternative.”
Family and friends
Carter often brings up his experience in South Africa on the campaign trail. When he joined the Peace Corps, he was following in the footsteps of his great-grandmother, Lillian. She volunteered in a health clinic in India. Jimmy Carter wrote about his mother’s service in an introduction for his grandson’s memoir.
Among the highlights of Jason Carter’s time in South Africa is his meeting with Nelson Mandela, the late anti-apartheid leader and former South African president. During a discussion at the Carter Center last month, his grandparents lovingly recalled how he and Mandela struck up a conversation in Zulu as Jimmy Carter waited to discuss some business with Mandela.
“Jimmy and I sat there and listened to it and we were totally out of the picture,” Rosalynn Carter recalled. “Jason and Nelson Mandela took up the whole time we were supposed to be doing something. It was just a fun story.”
Another highlight for Jason Carter involved befriending Selina Ndzukulu in Lochiel, the impoverished South African community where he volunteered. She went by the nickname “Gogo,” which means grandmother. An industrious and influential woman, she was involved in just about everything in her community. She led the local school governing body and served as a preschool principal, the postmaster, the head of the local branch of the Methodist Church, a landlord and the leader of the women’s gardening group. She also cooked and cleaned for her large family. She serves as a hero for Carter because of “what she did with the hand that she had been dealt.”
Gogo and his other friends in South Africa remain important to Carter. And he still keeps in touch with them. His family has been donating money to support the schools there. Asked whether he wants to return for a visit, he said: “I’d love to do it. Being the governor — the schedule’s kind of hectic, so it might have to wait.”
Staff writers Greg Bluestein and Jill Vejnoska contributed to this article.
Jason Carter
Age: 39
Home: Atlanta
Education: Bachelor of Arts in political science, Duke University, 1997; law degree, University of Georgia, 2004.
Work experience: volunteer, U.S. Peace Corps stationed in South Africa, 1998-2000; law clerk to Judge Frank Hull of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 2004-2005; attorney, Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore LLP, 2005-present; trustee, The Carter Center, 2009-present; senator, Georgia Senate, 2010-present.
Family: Married with two sons.
State Senate highlights
2011: Voted against House Bill 87, a stringent crackdown on illegal immigration in Georgia.
2013: Introduced Senate Bill 59 to expand access to the HOPE scholarship by reinstating eligibility to technical college students with a minimum 2.0 grade-point average. The bill didn’t make it out of committee, but Gov. Nathan Deal signed a Republican House bill to do the same thing that year.
2013: Introduced Senate Bill 49 to overhaul the state’s scandal-plagued ethics commission. SB 49 didn’t come up for a vote in the Senate. But the ethics commission has become a major talking point in Carter’s campaign.
2014: Voted for House Bill 60, which expands where Georgians can legally carry firearms.
2014: Introduced Senate Resolution 750 to create a separate state education budget. It didn’t get a vote in the Senate, but the idea has become the centerpiece of Carter’s gubernatorial campaign.
2014: Voted against the fiscal 2015 state budget.
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