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As of this writing, it has been a week since Biden’s shockingly poor performance in the debate with former President Trump, and it is becoming increasingly clear that President Biden will be forced to abandon his reelection bid and select a new candidate at his party’s convention.
Biden will be the first president in 56 years to choose not to run for re-election.
The last time such a president was Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who left office at the end of March 1968, three and a half years after winning a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater.
Biden will be the first president in 56 years to choose not to run for re-election. (Getty Images)
Early in Johnson’s term, highlights of the Great Society, such as the introduction of Medicare, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the launch of the War on Poverty, led many to believe he would be as important a president as Franklin D. Roosevelt, but opposition to his actions in the Vietnam War and the riots that broke out in many of America’s largest cities in 1967 severely weakened his political power.
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At the time of Johnson’s announcement, two weeks after the disappointing New Hampshire primary (anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy received more than 40% of the vote to Johnson’s less than 50%) and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (the late president’s brother) had just entered the race, opinion polls still suggested that Johnson was likely to win the nomination and that the November election was likely to be a close one.
President Johnson made the announcement at the end of a speech calling for a resolution to the Vietnam War, in which he unilaterally halted the bombing of Communist-led North Vietnam and called on North Korea to begin peace talks.
The words he spoke were not included in the advance “verification of remarks” announcement provided to media organizations, so the audience was shocked by his closing words.
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“At a time when America’s sons toil in far-flung fields, when America’s future is at stake at home, when our hopes for peace and the world are daily endangered, I do not believe that one hour of my time, nor one day, should be spent on personal partisan pursuits or on any other duty than this great office — the office of President of your country.
“Accordingly, I will not seek or accept my party’s nomination for another term as president.”
Trump hid his decision to avoid a divisive nomination fight and a tough general election contest with Republicans (and independent electoral vote winner George Wallace) from his desire to accomplish an end to the Vietnam War, but most believed he did so out of political weakness.
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Of course, he was unable to get a deal done with North Vietnam, the Democrats were plunged into a divisive convention, and there were riots in Chicago.
As Joe Biden struggles to figure out how to respond to his disastrous performance in the June debate with former President Trump, he finds himself in roughly the same position as President Johnson in 1968. Many in his party, including donors and party leaders, are pressuring him (publicly and privately) to drop out of the race, and many believe, and polls back that up, that he would face an uphill battle against Trump if he stays in the race.
President Lyndon Johnson addresses members of the Advisory Committee on Civil and Political Disturbances at its first meeting at the White House on July 29, 1967. (AP Photo/WX)
Meanwhile, Biden is pushing for a ceasefire in Israel’s Gaza war and trying to help Ukraine turn the tide in its fight against Russia. Like Johnson, Biden has passed a lot of domestic legislation, but like Johnson, it doesn’t seem to help in terms of public support. The economy may be growing in terms of jobs, but all people talk about is high prices.
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Reportedly, most of the Democratic Party “elites” — the same elite politicians, donors, and media who called off the 2020 campaign after Biden’s win in South Carolina and the subsequent Super Tuesday primary, effectively handing the nomination to Biden — have apparently decided that the best way to defeat Donald Trump is for Biden to drop out of the race.
If Biden persists in running, he may believe he can win the convention given the number of “pledged” delegates he has, but he should be concerned about the possibility of mass protests outside the convention site in Chicago by young people motivated by his decision to run and by his handling of the Israel-Gaza war. It may not be the kind of rioting that so devastated Hubert Humphrey’s campaign, but it still won’t help in November.
If Trump decides to stop campaigning (and the pressure to do so is growing by the hour), he will probably follow the example of his predecessor, Johnson, and focus on overseas challenges and the need to continue managing the economy.
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The question for the US then becomes: Will a lame-duck president make it even harder to achieve his goals and allow Republicans to make the case that Biden and the Democrats have thrown the world into chaos and got the economy wrong? Whoever the Democrats ultimately nominate will be more linguistically fluent than Biden and will likely perform better in debates, but they will still be forced to defend Biden/Democrat record.
Indeed, the unanswered question about LBJ’s decision is whether he could have done better had he not been a lame duck, given how close he came to closing a deal with Vietnam. And similarly, whether he could have done better than Humphrey did in 1968.
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