Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Playboy Magazine in November, 1976, accompanying Robert Scheer’s famous interview with President Jimmy Carter, and has been pulled from Robert Scheer’s book, ‘Playing President’ and posted here at ScheerPost in light of Carter’s death on December 29, 2024. The book was published by Akashic Books, Ltd. You can buy the book on Amazon.

The man himself is sitting, smile in place, in his studiously plain living room in front of a life-size portrait of his daughter, Amy, as though he were waiting for Norman Rockwell to appear. He is dressed in rumpled, down-home Levi’s shirt and pants and is telling me and my Playboy editor that it would be a good thing to have a Southern Baptist as President, because it would be good for the young, the poor, blacks, women, and even those citizens who might be inclined to fornicate without the blessings of marriage. And once again, one wonders if Jimmy Carter is not too good to be true.

On one level, the man is simply preposterous. On another, he seems reasonable, sincere, and eminently sensible. It is difficult for me to believe that after four months of following him around the country, listening to the same speech five or six times a day, and after many hours of one-on-one conversation, I still nod in smiling agreement, like some kind of spaced-out Moonie, as another human being tells me he would never lie, would never be egotistical, doesn’t fear death, would make federal government simple, workable, responsive to the average citizen, and that, in addition to doing away with the fear of death, he would do away with the fear of taxes.

As we stumble out into the muggy heat of Plains, Georgia, a movie-set hamlet of about eight buildings and what seem like two hundred photographers, all taking pictures of Jimmy’s Central Casting mother, Miss Lillian, my editor tells me, “Hey, I really like the guy.� Then, not thirty seconds later, he wonders aloud if we’ve been had. Which is how it always is with a James Earl Carter performance.

The ambiguity that one feels about Carter can be maddening. Is he one of the most packaged and manipulative candidates in our time or a Lincolnesque barefoot boy who swooped out of nowhere at a time when we needed him? Is he a rigid proselytizer who wants to convert the country to his own vision of small-town, Sunday-school values or just a guy who believes in his personal God and will let the rest of us believe whatever the hell we want? Is he a true populist from something called the New South or yet another creature of the Eastern Establishment?

Hanging Out with Carter’s Act

When Carter is a winner—and he seems to be as I write this in the fall of 1976—all these doubts emerge: his puritanism, his waffling on key questions, the sense that he and his campaign are an inexorable machine that have made us all cave in without really testing him. There is also at times an insufferable arrogance that seems almost patrician. But despite all that, when defeat threatened, back in the primary days, I was drawn to the man.

One night during the Oregon primary, the press people traveling with Carter were put up at a third-rate hotel and that fact seemed symbolic of what was then thought to be the coming disintegration of his campaign. The other candidates, Frank Church and Jerry Brown, were staying at better hotels. We were staying where we were because Carter had made a last-minute desperation switch in his schedule to spend an extra weekend in Oregon. He was running scared.

Brown had won handily in Maryland and Church seemed well ahead in Oregon. It looked as if Carter was facing a third-place finish in this Western primary. All of which seemed to portend the resuscitation of Hubert Humphrey’s political corpse. Sam Donaldson, the ABC television correspondent, sat slumped in a sofa in the seedy hotel lobby and announced to anyone who would listen, “I smell blood in the water.� We asked him to elaborate. “I smell a loser,� he said. “I have a very sensitive nose and James Earl Carter is a loser.�

Donaldson is a good reporter and the judgment was so definitively stated that I mulled it over and was surprised to find myself suddenly depressed by the prospect of Carter’s defeat. I say this with some objectivity, because, on the surface, the man was further from my own political beliefs than some of his more liberal opponents; but I didn’t want him to leave the political stage. It was a sense that he did, in fact, represent some new, needed force that I couldn’t yet define—but that somehow ought to have its day.

The feeling grew as I spent time with Carter, his family, and his aides in the months leading up to his nomination. To start with his aides, I found it increasingly difficult to think of them as possessing that cold-blooded uniformity of the Nixon gendarmes. Press secretary Jody Powell, campaign manager Hamilton Jordan, speechwriter Pat Anderson, and pollster Pat Caddell just don’t fit the Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell stereotypes. They are effective packagers, but worries about the palace guard throwing up the gates around the White House seem to fade as one stays up all night drinking with them in some redneck bar.

Maybe I’m just being suckered in by too much rural Southern exotica, but there is something raw, spontaneous, and physical about the people around Carter that puts a limit on their malleability and opportunism. It causes them to fuck up in ways I find reassuring. On one such occasion, I was riding with Jody and his wife, Nan, from Plains to nearby Americus. A car behind crowded us too closely and then passed, narrowly missing us. Jody shouted, “That fucking ass-hole!� and took off after the car. It would have made a fine wire-service story: Carter’s press secretary, a former football player, wipes up the street with some local toughs. Nan managed to cool him down, but it was clear to me that in that moment, Jody had stopped being a politician’s aide. On another occasion, Jody and Pat Anderson got into a hassle with some locals over a rented car. Again, shouts and anger while the next President of the United States cooled his heels, waiting for Pat to show up with a draft of his acceptance speech.

One of Jody’s more useful functions on the campaign is to serve as proof that one can have been born in a small Southern town, be a Baptist, serve for six years as Carter’s closest aide, and still not be tight-assed. Add to that, Anderson, who has written a novel called The President’s Mistress; Caddell, hip and fresh out of Cambridge; Gerald Rafshoon, his media adviser and something of a carouser; Greg Schneiders, a one-time Washington restaurateur who is Carter’s administrative assistant—and it becomes clear that Carter has not applied his concern with the Ten Commandments to the behavior of his staff. They are, at least some of them, as hard-drinking, fornicating, pot-smoking, freethinking a group as has been seen in higher politics.

Here’s an exchange I taped with Hamilton Jordan:

SCHEER Given the purity this campaign has projected, I find it odd that few of you guys go to church, that you all drink and mess around, and some of you even smoke dope. Isn’t there a contradiction?

Reporting on the election often involves being glued to computer screens dictating the polling numbers around the country and using statistics revolving around race and gender to make assumptions about how the country is politically swaying. Journalist and online host Michael Tracey actually went out to many prominent swing states throughout the election and spoke to various swaths of voters, engaging in what their vote really means and how ordinary Americans view Vice President Kamala Harris and newly elected Donald Trump.

Tracey joins Scheer Intelligence host Robert Scheer to discuss the election, why Trump won and what his second term holds for the future of the country and the globe. On the side of foreign policy, Tracey says people ought to be wary of Trump’s peace rhetoric and look at his record as president. “Although Trump was seen as in conflict with the so-called neocons in 2016, he then undertook a foreign policy in which he escalated virtually every conflict that he inherited,� Tracey tells Scheer.

Tracey cites regime change in Venezuela, trouble with Iran and bolstering NATO. When it comes to domestic issues and why the US went for Trump in such a grand way, Tracey points to the failures of the Democrats to appeal to common voters, pay attention to the issues they truly care about and allowed them to succumb to Trump’s everyman rhetoric, despite what he might actually do once in office.

“What is deficient about [the Democrats’] own messaging, it has alienated such wide swaths of people who, in earlier eras, would have been considered squarely within their coalition,� Tracey asserts.

In the end, the Democrats parading around people like Liz Cheney and ignoring crucial issues like the genocide in Palestine hurt them, as was proven through the popular vote. Tracey indicts their strategy: “Liberalism is so oriented itself around the personage of Trump that it’s kind of been given a free pass from defining itself on its own terms.�

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Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Video Producer:

Max Jones

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s somebody who, oh, my goodness, a third my age, or something, 36 years old, but reminds me of myself at an earlier stage of my life, a terrific, energetic, smart, sharp journalist, kicking ass. And you’re responsible for, of course, the victory of Donald Trump because you wrote an article about why I won’t vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. It was a heresy to take such a position. You also were responsible for the defeat of Hillary Clinton, because you took a similar position of abstaining at that time. But you have the honesty, it seems to me, of expressing your doubts and opinions in public and including who you’re going to vote for and so forth. And I must say, though I found this article that you wrote before the election put me to shame in my own thinking, and it’s left me, by the way, now very depressed, much more depressed about the election than if I hadn’t read it, and that is because it wasn’t as if you were saying there wasn’t anything important going on this election. Quite the opposite. Your defense, let me let people in on the gag here, you voted for Fred Flintstone. You wrote in the name because you figured that both of these candidates were trying to put us back in the stone age and then, of course, it’s a joke, haha. But the fact that matter is, the article reflected a great deal of research, and you came up with stuff that I really had suppressed or was unaware of because I had a pretty simple construct in my mind, and I was given to the same observation. I could not vote for either but in that construct, I thought this is really an argument between an isolationist, which was Trump, and somebody who bought into the whole Imperial America and American exceptionalism and the need to have the rules of law dictated from the Enlightened West and so forth, which is what Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are in, and I felt they were both very dangerous. But reading your article, and that’s a good place to start here, and this is why it scared me more than anything, you point out that Trump was really a quite aggressive, imperial foreign policy advocate, and even though he makes noises about we can negotiate with this one, and he’ll have peace in the Ukraine. And you could go through that history. I’ll let you do it, as you did in your article. But this guy, you know, right now, there’s a feeling, well, at least the neocons and the hawks have gone to the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is weakened, except when you look at the Republicans in Congress, like when Netanyahu came and so forth, they were wilder than the Democrats. At least Democrats, many of them absented themselves, but even on the Ukraine, where one wants to limit that war or get out of it, you make the point, no, let’s not forget what Donald Trump did. And you made one very important observation, which I think should guide this interview, the reason why I want to do it, you said, we’re not talking about somebody who wasn’t president. We’re not speculating, as we were back in 2016 this guy’s been in office for four years, and on both the domestic and foreign policy record, he’s got one. And in fact, ironically, while most people I know feel he was a terrible president, he actually did much better in this election. Surprised everyone and you pointed out in one of your other articles that I read, I think it was in Pennsylvania, someplace, that most people, and we see that in the polling result, that a majority of people actually this time around, and judging his past performance, thought it was pretty good. They didn’t think it was a disaster. So why don’t you give me the benefit of your wisdom on all this. You’ve covered, and I’m being serious here, you’ve done what I really admired in journalists past and present, going back to I.F. Stone, you actually got out there and listened to people, talked to them, did it with your listening ears open. Everybody find out where they’re coming from. You didn’t call people garbage or deplorable. You actually listen. And you know, I wasn’t all that familiar with your work, but having caught up on it, I think you do, you have an admirable brand of journalism. I should mention also, you’ve done shows up for Glenn Greenwald. You’ve been on with Tucker Carlson. You have this play on the word heard. Have you heard? You do a big lot in the blogosphere. You have a big following, but basically, give me your take on what you learned in covering the election. What do you think is at stake now?

Michael Tracey

Well, thank you very much for the kind words. It means a lot coming from you. I’ve read your work and followed you for a number of years now, although I might be maybe slightly over a third of your age, but enough that…

Robert Scheer

Let’s have your secret out here. You’re 36, I’m 88. I didn’t do the math. It’s a pretty goddamn big distance, okay?

Michael Tracey

The genocide in Gaza has brought the issue of Israel — and what it represents for Jewish people — into the forefront of Jewish communities worldwide. The powerful influence of the Israel lobby on Israel’s image in the United States makes this issue highly contentious and deeply complex.

In this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, host Robert Scheer and Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), a nonprofit dedicated to fostering peace between Israel and Palestine, explain — as two Jewish individuals — how they navigate these complex issues, both in their professional work and personal lives.

Drawing on her experience working with the U.S. Foreign Service in Jerusalem around the time of the Oslo Accords, Friedman offers a complex view of the politics of the situation. Friedman discusses not only the evolving Jewish relationship to Israel but also the plight of the Palestinians who are often subjected to displacement, violence and death.

Friedman highlights a critical distinction when discussing the Oslo Accords: unlike most treaties, which are based on a balance of interests, the Israel-Palestine agreement is rooted in a balance of power. This dynamic, which heavily favors Israel, was recognized by Friedman: “I think that became very clear as the underlying dynamic of Oslo very, very quickly.�

When it comes to interpreting Israel, Friedman points out the difficulty in engaging with its defenders. “The entirety of Israel’s existence has been grounded in a series of narratives, and it’s almost a pick a long menu for which narrative best suits you at what moment,� she tells Scheer.

The narrative turning Hamas’ recent attack on Israel into a justification of the genocidal attack on Gaza has made it very difficult for anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jews to express themselves. Friedman conveys her frustration:

“I’m now living in a world where it doesn’t matter what your level of faith is, it doesn’t matter what your genealogy is, it doesn’t matter your self identification. If you’re not deeply Zionist in your political outlook, then you’re not really a Jew.�

Video Link

Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add the intelligence comes to my guests, and we’re going to have a discussion with Lara Friedman. And what the reason I want to do this is somebody who was, you know, taking a position on what’s going on between Israel and Gaza, but she does it from a really informed perspective. Worked in the US government — I’ll let her lay it out — has an academic training and background, and has grown up as a Jewish person trying to figure out her relation to Israel, which is really the point of this discussion. I can’t stand the stereotyping which basically marginalize or rejects any Jewish person who raises any questions about the Jewish lobby of AIPAC or about what Israel is doing, and it seems to me basically a denial of what the Jewish experience is all about, particularly diaspora Jews, which is, of course, but also Talmudic Jews, questioning everything and dialogue. So I am trying to have a dialogue here. So take it away. Lara Freeman, tell me about your connection with this issue and also your views. So what’s going on?

Lara Friedman

The “big club� that “you ain’t in,� as George Carlin famously put it, is increasingly visible as the presidential election rolls on toward November. Politicians and the donor class that controls them have made it known to the public that they are not representatives of the majority but rather the small elite minority. Nomi Prins, financial historian, author and former Goldman Sachs managing director, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to describe exactly how this process works as well as touch on the evolution of the world economy away from the U.S.

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As a result of U.S. mishaps in 2008 with the financial crisis as well as the current geopolitical involvements in Ukraine and growing disruptions between the U.S. and China, Prins explains how the world is recognizing the ability to move past the U.S. as well as the dollar: “What’s happened is the alliance of nations that needed the U.S. and needed the dollar to trade don’t need it anymore.� China’s rise with the BRICS nations alongside has encouraged this, and the U.S.’s policies of supporting the financial system and allowing the banks to run things has led to the rest of the world to say, “We will compete, we’ll do exactly what you’re doing, but we’re going to do it on our own terms.�

Back at home, when it comes to economic justice, the two party system, in short, is a farce, and the difference between how the internal system of each party works is hardly noticeable. “Everything kind of moves upward and gets smaller as it moves upward in terms of who has the power and who wants to retain the power,� Prins tells Scheer. That’s why, she asserts, “even if things get questioned on the surface, the idea of changing them doesn’t really get pushed throughout party policy.�

As much as people try to push for or enact change, the questions fall on deaf ears, Prins says. People “can blame the other party, they can blame each other, but they don’t get to blame the system, because they don’t feel that there’s any real connection or control that they could have over the system.�

Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer

This is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. In this case, Dr. Nomi Prins, I would say, I think most people in the world, even when they pretend they know about banking and the international banking, are really full of it, frankly, and I did my graduate work in economics and everything. There’s only one person that I can turn to who really makes sense of it. She’s not working for the Big Bang. She’s not she did once worked for Goldman Sachs as a manager, but she’s an independent writer in the best sense of the word, and she has written a whole list of the most important books about international banking, the World Bank, trading system, central banks and so forth. And I’ve guided, I think, three podcasts with her that you can find here on KCRW and elsewhere, and but I want to focus on what I think is the issue with central banking. Right today, there is a rebellion against the power of the central banks, basically of the Western economies. And the revolt takes in people of different religions, economic outlet, different ideology. It’s United China and India, to some degree, they are both part of this BRICS coalition that is challenging the power of the dollar, the power of the central banks that cooperate with it. I’m going to turn it over to you Nomi, because I want to know, is this a time of profound change challenge, what’s going on? And you know, the banking system has been used for political leverage in an extreme way, in terms of the boycott of Russia, pushing China around and so forth, but there seems to be a rebellion that might be having a big impact take it away.

Nomi Prins

Yeah, and thanks. It’s so great to be speaking with you again. It’s been a while, and thank you for the intro. And yes, we are in the middle of, not even the middle, I think we’re at the beginning of a transformation of global trade and the center where global power is from the standpoint of economics that started really as a result, initially, of the financial crisis of 2008 and just the fact that the US banking system, the Fed accessor, was so ill equipped to handle itself, to contain its own risk, but over the years, and particularly in the wake of covid of supply chain disruptions, of what happened when Russia, Russia escalated its war in the Ukraine, and subsequently the US cut off some of its access to international financing. All of these elements have been part of a growing transformation in the global economy that is creating two specific polls. One is the Old West, centered around the United States, Europe, et cetera. And then one is the BRICS, plus countries, which now include a number of Middle East countries as well that are that are oil producing, natural gas producing, and themselves very involved in the energy markets that center around China. And what has happened is that Chinese central bank has really divorced itself in the policy of the Fed. It acted in concert with the Fed in the wake of 2008 now it doesn’t, and there’s a real shift towards this re regionalization of trade, and that’s not going to diminish, and with that, a de dollarization. It’s not like the dog’s gonna go away tomorrow, but trade that happens without the dollar. Some of this was because of US policy and in retaliation to US policy, and some of it’s just in a general strengthening of alliances, trade alliances and political alliances between the BRICS plus countries and other countries that are even wanting to be a part of BRICS Plus, there is a large list of countries that want to join, and this is going to continue. This is how the world is developing right now.

Robert Scheer

Well, it’s incredibly significant and all sorts of implications. One is the prosperity of Western capitalist countries, particularly the United States that got a big leap forward after World War Two, most economies were destroyed. Others were in a low level of development with huge populations, India, China and so forth, and even the rich resource rich countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia were totally controlled by Western, British Petroleum and other Western companies, the CIA meddled in their affairs and everything, and as a result, the dollar was unhinged from the gold standard, and the dollar became an independent force. Now there’s a lot of people have talked about that over the years. And one thing we can agree on, it favored the one country that can print dollars, the United States, and that is, seems to be at the crux of the matter, that the United States can throw its weight around because it can encourage inflation, discourage it print more or what have you. And basically these other economies that don’t seem to agree on very much. I mean, used to be Saudi Arabia and Russia were at odds. Now they’re allied in OPEC, plus China and India. I mean, they still have a lot of tension, but they seem to be in agreement on challenging the dollar. Does it go to a basic question of ethics and economics, and have we rigged a game? And is it now being questioned? We being the US?

Nomi Prins

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It is around that time in an election year where the typical platitudes and ultimatums exclaiming it is “do or die,� “now or never� are being thrown around. The overarching narrative from the past two elections remains the same: the Democrats are not great: they bolster the military industrial complex, make empty promises to working people and maintain sometimes identical policies to their right wing counterparts on issues like immigration … but we must choose them or face the wrath of Donald Trump and the Republicans.

In this spirited debate on the Scheer Intelligence podcast, host Robert Scheer spars with Jeff Cohen—author, co-founder of RootsAction.org, founder of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and retired journalism professor at Ithaca College. The two butt heads around the issue of lesser evilism, questioning whether this year will bring actual change from the Democrats in their support for Israel’s suppression of the Palestineans alongside a range of other pressing issues.

Cohen stresses that while the Biden administration’s actions involving Gaza, Ukraine and its saber-rattling of China and Russia are “inexcusable,� a Trump reelection will prove to be worse on all fronts. “Trump’s second term will be very, very different than the first. He had no plan, it was chaotic. They [now] have a plan,� Cohen tells Scheer. “They’re going to implement ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ which threatens the whole planet. And trust me, they have a plan to suppress progressive dissent.�

Scheer fires back, arguing that this is the exact same argument that has been heard not only in recent elections but for most of his long life. “What we do is we center most of our political discussion, knowledge in this country around the character of the president and these periodic elections: who are the virtuous, who are the evil?� Scheer retorts. “Whereas, in fact, we face very profound, systemic problems that the election tends to obscure.�

Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer: Hi. This is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence where the intelligence comes from my guest, in this case, it’s somebody I have admired for a number of decades now, Jeff Cohen. And I knew him in many incarnations, but Jeff, you were a Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College. And I remember, because you administered the Izzy Awards in memory of a great journalist, I.F. Stone, fiercely independent. And I first was introduced to him hanging on a subway strap and on the IRT in the Bronx, reading him when he was in the PM or Compass or New York paper, and I just admired him, and I followed him over the years. And then when I was editing ramparts, I was actually able to commission him to write about the Six Day War, because he had been on one of the first ships taking refugees in to what became Israel and and he wrote a quite independent article raising some serious questions about this preemptive war that ended up giving Israel the West Bank, Gaza, part of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. And so I want to, I guess what I want to talk to you about today you’ve been on the progressive side of things. We’re talking in the middle of this democratic convention, the coronation of Kamala Harris. And you were, I was at the 216 convention when Bernie got pushed down by the party establishment and Hillary Clinton got the nomination. And you and Norman Solomon, a colleague and activist friend of yours, in Roots Action, a grassroots group, were very instrumental in organizing a progressive coalition that raised a lot of questions, and then you were a delegate to pandemic got in the way, and so it was by virtual to the 2020 convention. And I want to know, yeah, I want to do a check in with you on what’s going on. We were now, you know, we heard from the Clintons and Barack Obama and everybody else. You know how great the Democratic Party is… And, you know, but the Democratic Party we’re in the middle of, you know, what the UN is now calling a genocide, and horror in the Mideast wing, dangerous situation in Ukraine, all these armaments going in and what’s going to happen there. The Democratic Party also strikes me as kind of the war party. Now, Kamala Harris has said some things critical about the treatment by Israel of people in Gaza. But nonetheless, you know, I noticed in Joe Biden’s speech down there, he didn’t even, I don’t think, endorsed the two state solution. It was kind of, you know… So what’s your take on what’s going on? And where is the progressive block here in the Democratic Party? Are they being co opted? Are they getting their wish? Is Kamala an improvement? She at least talks about working people well, and she doesn’t call them the deplorables, right? Well, go ahead.