When he started out running for president of the United States, Jimmy Carter would stop people on the streets of New Hampshire and introduce himself to total strangers.

Rare indeed was the person who had even heard his name, much less knew that the former nuclear engineer had once been the governor of Georgia.

Carter’s longshot bid was a classic “grass-roots” effort – an attempt to get a little something to take root on a surface where nothing was growing before. In today’s political world they call it gaining “traction.” Former President George H.W. Bush also referred to it as “the big Mo,” short for “mo mentum.”

When Carter, a Democrat, knocked on doors in New Hampshire in the early going – long before his campaign had anything in the way of traction – people were a little suspicious when they saw him standing there.

That, of course, changed over time, but Carter had to put the work in himself, attending our coffee klatches, Rotary lunches and intimate gatherings at which he could make his pitch to Democrats and independents. He had no staff and no surrogates to send in his stead. It was just he and the missus. That’s as grass roots as it gets.

Fast forward to the present day, when many Democrats are pinning their hopes on another candidate some would like people to perceive as a “grass-roots” candidate. They would like Hillary Clinton – a former First Lady and Secretary of State – to ride out of the fog of history and succeed Barack Obama as president of the United States.

“We were set up to build a grassroots movement across the country to a urge her to seek the presidency in 2016 and demonstrate to her if she decides to do this there is a groundswell of national support for her,’’ said former Clinton family associate Craig Smith during a visit to The Granite State last week.

Hillary Clinton may yet become our nation’s first woman president, but the suggestion that Smith’s group, “Ready for Hillary,” represents some kind of “grass-roots” movement to bring her into the presidential race is absurd.

The days when anyone connected to the Clintons could assume the guise of “grassroots” are long gone. Hillary is a bona fide political brand and, if she’s “grass roots,” Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland are family farmers.

If Hillary Clinton knocked on somebody’s door in New Hampshire now in an attempt to emulate pre-1976 Jimmy Carter – never mind for a second that she’d be buried under an avalanche of television cameras – the homeowner would probably react as if Ed McMahon and the Prize Patrol had just showed up with the balloons and giant check.

Point being, there’s nobody who doesn’t know who she is. That alone should disqualify anyone from using the term “grass roots” to describe anything even remotely connected to any Hillary campaign that might be brewing.

Lining up a frontrunner’s Internet and social media infrastructure and calling it “grass roots” strikes us as disingenuous, when what it really represents is merely the type of 21st-century political fertilizing that’s required to succeed in the smartphone era.

The New Hampshire primary has a long tradition of offering relatively obscure candidates – like Ron Paul recently, or a young upstart Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton in the early 1990s – a chance to compete on a level playing field against establishment frontrunners who already have name recognition and access to fat stacks of cash; someone very much like today’s Hillary Clinton, come to think of it.

There’s nothing wrong with a candidate falling into either the underdog or frontrunner category, but to try to occupy both is a real stretch.

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