The un-celebrity president: Jimmy Carter shuns riches and lives modestly in his Georgia hometown
PLAINS — Jimmy Carter finishes his Saturday night dinner, salmon and broccoli casserole on a paper plate, flashes his famous toothy grin and calls playfully to his wife of 72 years, Rosalynn: "C'mon, kid."
She laughs and takes his hand, and they walk carefully through a neighbor's kitchen filled with 1976 campaign buttons, photos of world leaders and a couple of unopened cans of Billy Beer, then out the back door, where three Secret Service agents wait.
They do this just about every weekend in this tiny town where they were born — he almost 94 years ago, she 91. Dinner at their friend Jill Stuckey's house, with plastic Solo cups of ice water and one glass each of bargain-brand chardonnay, then the half-mile walk home to the ranch house they built in 1961.
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On this south Georgia summer evening, still close to 90 degrees, they dab their faces with a little plastic bottle of No Natz to repel the swirling clouds of tiny bugs. Then they catch each other's hands again and start walking, the former president in jeans and clunky black shoes, the former first lady using a walking stick for the first time.
The 39th president of the United States lives modestly, a sharp contrast to his successors, who have left the White House to embrace power of another kind: wealth.
Even those who didn't start out rich, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have made tens of millions of dollars on the private-sector opportunities that flow so easily to ex-presidents.
When Carter left the White House after one tumultuous term, trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, he returned to Plains, a speck of peanut and cotton farmland that to this day has a poverty rate of nearly 40 percent.
The Democratic former president decided not to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn't want to "capitalize financially on being in the White House."
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said that Gerald Ford, Carter's predecessor and close friend, was the first to fully take advantage of those high-paid post-presidential opportunities, but that "Carter did the opposite."
Since Ford, other former presidents, and sometimes their spouses, routinely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars on speeches.
"I don't see anything wrong with it; I don't blame other people for doing it," Carter says over dinner. "It just never had been my ambition to be rich."
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You cannot violate the Emoluments Clause. After all he was worth several million. 
