Robert Costa: Nobody Called Jimmy Carter a 'Vampire'

Listening to President Obama malign Mitt Romney's private-sector career this week brought to mind a presidential candidate who once ran and won on his record as a successful businessman.

 

A few months after Jimmy Carter's father died in 1953, the future president was honorably discharged from the Navy. He moved home, to Plains, Ga., to manage his family's peanut farm, which had fallen on hard times. During the first year, Mr. Carter struggled to keep the warehouse humming. He went into debt. He applied for a loan, only to be denied. But Mr. Carter didn't quit. He didn't blame the local bank for his troubles or occupy the town's square. He simply rolled up his sleeves and went to work on the floor, hoisting bags of peanuts alongside his employees.

 

These days, Mr. Carter, a global community organizer, shares many traits with President Obama, including a penchant for idiosyncratic intervention and tax hikes. But during the decades before he ran for president, he was a tough and ambitious entrepreneur—more like Mitt Romney at Bain Capital than Mr. Obama on the streets of Chicago...