ATLANTA (AP) — As the 2024 campaign season begins, political players are looking in the mirror and deciding whether they see an American president staring back.

It was no different for Jimmy Carter in the early 1970s. And it took meeting several presidential candidates and then encouragement from an esteemed elder statesman before the young governor of Georgia, who had never met a president himself, saw himself as something bigger.

He announced his White House bid on Dec. 12, 1974, amid fallout from the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon's resignation. Then he leveraged his unknown — and...