Biden Knew Carter Was in Trouble in 1979. Now He’s in the Same Boat
When an unpopular Democratic incumbent president was struggling to build support for a second term, a young Delaware senator floated the idea that the party consider other options for the top of the ticket.
“That man’s in trouble, politically in trouble,” Joe Biden said of then-President Jimmy Carter in July 1979, according to an account at the time in the Wilmington Evening Journal. Biden had held off on publicly backing Carter because he wanted to endorse a candidate who would ensure Democrats retained the White House in the 1980 election. “I’m not certain that’s Jimmy Carter right now,” he told the paper.
Biden was in a position to know. He held a leadership post in Carter’s successful 1976 presidential bid after becoming the first sitting U.S. senator to endorse him. Biden eventually backed Carter’s failed 1980 re-election bid, and the bond they formed early in Biden’s career lasted through a large part of their lives.
Now Biden is himself in the White House and stumbling in some of the same ways as Carter as he sets out to win a second term. Both men struggled to sell legislative victories and retain the party’s core voters as high inflation and foreign-policy disasters eroded their support. And both men had a disconnect with voters that’s leaving Democrats afraid that Biden could share Carter’s political fate of being a one-term president.
"They both have made important decisions that are substantively in the interests of the country—but when they charge up the hill and they look behind them, there are not a hell of a lot of people following,” said Jonathan Alter, a Carter biographer. “Biden is experiencing some of the basic leadership challenges that Carter did where he’s losing his connection to the American people as Carter did.”
The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment, and the Carter Center declined to comment.
Biden’s early, close-up view of Carter’s presidency afforded him some lessons in politics that he appears to have heeded, particularly forming an iron grip on his party. Where Carter faced a grueling primary challenge from now-deceased Sen. Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), Biden has gone to great lengths to stay in touch with the liberal flank of the party. He faces little threat from Democratic challengers but is himself contending with a challenge from a Kennedy—attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is staging a long-shot third-party presidential bid.
Biden got to know Carter in 1974 after Biden and his brother visited Carter in the Georgia governor’s mansion. Carter quizzed him about his upset Senate victory and political philosophy. “I told him I felt people were more interested in believability and whether a candidate cared for them than programs and problem-solving,” Biden told the Philadelphia Inquirer for a May 1977 piece that included some details of the visit.
At the time, a number of leading politicians were visiting Carter to get his blessing for their own presidential runs, recalled Stuart Eizenstat, who advised Carter while he was in Georgia and was his domestic policy chief in the White House. Biden, who was too young to seek the presidency himself, wasn’t a political rival. “They really bonded,” said Eizenstat.
They also discussed policy, with Carter going through his zero-based budgeting program, a method to allocate funds for government programs based on current needs instead of historic use, and Biden touting his legislation to curb the size of the federal budget, according to Biden’s account in the Philadelphia Inquirer. But when Carter was president, Biden was critical of the president’s spending plans even though they were austere by today’s standards.
Biden said in 1979 that Carter’s newly unveiled budget needed “fine-tuning” to reduce the amount of spending the president had proposed and pull back on taxes, according to the Wilmington Evening Journal. Biden at the time said “there’s a helluva lot of fat” in federal agencies and favored across-the-board budget cuts and employment ceilings. Biden’s critique was closer to that of Republicans, as Carter’s budget only allowed for a small increase in federal spending over inflation.
Carter biographers note that Biden had faced his own re-election in Delaware and benefited from positioning himself to the right of the Democratic president. Indeed, in 1978, Biden ran on fighting inflation—an issue that bedeviled Carter.
"The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,” Biden said in a full-page ad his campaign placed in the Wilmington Morning News in October 1978. “We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”
Biden, as president, signed into law a $1.9 trillion stimulus that some within his party blame for contributing to the spurt of inflation that has dogged his presidency.
Carter biographers point out that the current inflationary period—inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022—is far tamer than the more than 13% inflation that Carter saw. “The difference is that our high inflation persisted,” said Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy adviser, adding that “we would have killed” for inflation to be at the roughly 3% rate that Biden now sees.
Biden often complained about Carter’s operation and staff. Although he initially led the national steering committee for Carter’s 1976 campaign, Biden later described the campaign as “a disorganized array.” Biden once complained that the White House staff was so unresponsive that the only person he could get on the phone there was the president.
“The president is learning, but not fast enough,” Biden said at an October 1977 Delaware State Chamber of Commerce dinner, according to the Wilmington Morning News. He accused Carter’s staff of failing to prioritize. “Everything was important to his neophyte staff and therefore nothing was important,” Biden said.
Policy differences—and Biden’s occasional complaints in the press—didn’t break the relationship between the two. Carter repaid Biden’s early campaign endorsement by traveling via helicopter to Wilmington, Del., in February 1978 to headline two events for Biden, including a $1,000-per-couple fundraiser for Biden’s Senate campaign at the Hotel DuPont.
Carter “went to very, very few fundraisers” for members of Congress, said Eizenstat. “So this was a recognition of what Joe would have done for him and their friendship during the White House years.”
Yet Biden continued to provide running commentary about what he saw as Carter’s inadequacies.
After a contentious White House meeting that ended with Carter dismissing feminist Bella Abzug from her leadership post on the president’s National Advisory Committee on Women, Biden opined that the role of the president is “to deal with the major splintered coalitions in America, in a way that can make it work,” according to a February 1979 piece in the Wilmington News Journal. “I think that’s part of Jimmy Carter’s problem,” Biden said, “You’ve got to learn how to deal with the Bella Abzugs.”
When Carter reshuffled his cabinet in 1979, Biden criticized the way Carter did it, calling the president’s move “amateurish.”
Although Biden expressed doubts about Carter’s chances in 1980, he did endorse the sitting president and warned the White House that Kennedy was plotting a primary challenge. Biden had visited more than 30 states for Carter in 1976, but chose to play to a more limited role in the presidential re-election campaign.
Carter’s team dispatched Biden to Pennsylvania in the spring of 1980 ahead of the state’s primary. There Biden employed an argument that he now uses about his own candidacy, urging voters not to compare Carter to an overly high standard.
“Let’s face it, Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the second coming,” Biden told a group of Pennsylvania Democrats in April 1980, according to the Wilmington Morning News. “But he is doing a good job.”
Very late in the process—as there was some talk of having an open Democratic convention—Biden asked some of his fellow senators if they thought the party should look for a stronger candidate. “Not one saw anything to be gained in dumping Carter,” Biden reported back, according to an August 1980 piece in the Sacramento Bee.
Losing to Ronald Reagan made Carter a pariah in the Democratic Party. But Biden’s relationship with the former president persisted. Ahead of the 1988 presidential race, a parade of Democrats went to Georgia to quietly ask for Carter’s nod. Biden, instead, made a public show of visiting the former president to build support for his first presidential bid and later recognize Carter’s accomplishments as president.
Biden, as president, traveled to Georgia to visit Carter and attended Rosalynn Carter’s memorial service in November. In Biden’s White House, curators hung a set of prints first commissioned for Carter’s inauguration in a hallway near the Roosevelt Room. They included one by Andy Warhol, who drew Carter with a big grin.
“Joe did more than anybody to bring Carter out from the purgatory that other Democrats put him in,” Eizenstat said.
Source: WSJ
Both presidents faced inflation and foreign-policy challenges as they sought a second term.
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