Former president Jimmy Carter praised Barack Obama's run for the White House as "extraordinary" and potentially healing.
The elder statesman of the Democratic party also revealed that he had also spoken at length with former president Bill Clinton about his involvement in the 2008 presidential race.
"Obama's campaign has been extraordinary and titillating for me and my family," Carter said in an interview at his Georgia home Monday in which he stressed that he and his wife have never endorsed any presidential candidate since leaving the White House.
"We have four children with their spouses, we have eleven grandchildren, four or five of them are married, and all of them, except one, are for Obama," he said in an audioclip of the interview on the Wall Street Journal's website.
"I think that Obama will be almost automatically a healing factor in the animosity now and the distrust that relates to our country and its government," said Carter, 83, who was president from 1977-1981.
The 2002 Nobel Peace prize laureate added that his Democratic successor in the White House had called him Monday to confirm his participation in an event Carter has organized.
But the tension over race that erupted on the Democratic campaign trail last week dominated the conversation, Carter revealed.
"I got off the phone with a long talk with Bill Clinton who called me this morning trying to explain that he was not raising the race issue, and that sort of thing. I won't got into detail," Carter said.
Clinton "has said a few things that I think he wishes he hadn't said," the Wall Street Journal quoted Carter as saying.
"He doesn't call me often, but the fact that he called me this morning and spent a long time explaining his position indicates that it's troublesome to them, the adverse reaction.
"I told him I hoped it would die down...the charged atmosphere concerning the race issue. And I think it will," he said.
After black voters in South Carolina deserted her for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton on Sunday invoked icons Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King while preaching racial unity.
African Americans, a key Democratic constituency, went overwhelmingly for the Illinois senator in Saturday's primary vote -- in a stunning rebuff for Clinton, and her husband, ex-president Bill Clinton.
The defeat came after both camps accused the other of taking the campaign onto dangerous racial territory, as Obama strives to become the first black US president.
