Ex-Governor Carter Predicts Win in '76 Presidential Derby

"The next president of America will be a nuclear engineer who grows peanuts in Georgia," predicted Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter last night before an overflow crowd of about 500 in Harvard's Science Center B.

The 51-year-old former governor of Georgia said he cut the number of bureaucracies in Georgia from 300 to 22 and left the state with $116 million dollars in budget surplus. He reaffirmed his intention to run in all state presidential primaries.

Carter said the Democratic nomination would go to the candidate who could "convince Americans that government will be decent." By the March 9 Florida primary only he and one other candidate would be left, Carter predicted. "There will be no deadlocked convention in New York," he added.

Busing?

When asked his position on busing for purposes of racial integration, Carter said that as president he would be forced to uphold any decision of a federal court, but that he did not favor a constitutional amendment against busing.

Carter added that he considered the 1960s civil rights acts "the greatest things that happened to the South in my lifetime."

Responding to a question about Henry Kissinger, Carter said "the man is a brilliant negotiator. That's what I like about him." He said he favored detente, but that the US has been "on the short end of every deal we made with the Russians."

Adam Neiman, a Harvard student on leave this year to work as Carter's campus organizer for Massachusetts, characterized Carter support at Harvard as "very good." However, he added he did not think Carter would win in Massachusetts. "I don't think anyone can win more than 30 per cent of the vote," Neiman said.