By Bill Shipp (please also see a roundup of Hamilton Jordan articles and stories)

I’ve spent at least half my career playing “What might have been?”

News of Hamilton Jordan’s death Tuesday night made playing that perennial pundit’s game easy.

Hamilton was the smartest political consultant I ever knew. He also might have been the wisest of elected officials, if he could have conquered his persistent health problems and escaped the shadow of being a Jimmy Carter guy.

Hamilton did everything he could to beat cancer.

But he never once tried to disavow his Carter badge – as many other Southern Democrats did – to improve his chances of winning his 1986 Senate election.

Next to being a really smart southerner (the New York– Washington media just couldn’t fathom such a person), Hamilton was a 100 percent loyalist. Turning his back on governor-then-president Carter was not in his playbook.

Just as cancer gave him no slack, the national political media showed no mercy in hammering Jordan from the time he arrived in Washington as Carter’s top aide in 1976 through his unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 1986.

The Tobacco Road Republicans, who still control the Georgia GOP, used Hamilton as their whipping boy at every opportunity. Never mind that Hamilton, like former President  Carter, worked in a variety of good causes, from children’s health care to cutting-edge cancer research and organization of a third-way political effort.

“I never saw a person with greater courage or intelligence,” says Bert Lance, also a Carter stalwart and friend of Jordan.

In his presidential memoirs Keeping the Faith, Carter wrote: “Hamilton was more seriously misunderstood and underestimated by the press and public than anyone else who worked in my administration. A brilliant political analyst who had devised and managed my presidential campaign, he worked long hours through the most difficult decisions.”

During Carter’s tenure as governor, Hamilton as his chief of staff took over the reins of state government.

When Carter went to the White House, Hamilton was a keyplayer in the president’s triumphs – from Camp David to the Panama Canal Treaties that prevented a civil war. He also suffered with Carter the agonies of the Iran hostage crisis and the crumbling American economy.

His illness and death at 63 crushed and ended a career that might have achieved wonders in getting our nation and state back on the track to opportunity and prosperity for all.