President Joe Biden was reluctant to endorse President Jimmy Carter for a second term as the Democrat faced worrying poll numbers and high inflation.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on comments Biden made in 1979, as Carter prepared to seek reelection.
‘That man’s in trouble, politically in trouble,’ Biden said at the time, according to comments found in the Wilmington Evening Journal.
The U.S. senator from Delaware expressed that he was holding off endorsing Carter because he wanted to back a candidate who could retain the White House for the Democrats in 1980.
‘I’m not certain that’s Jimmy Carter right now,’ Biden told his local paper.
President Jimmy Carter (left) appears at a fundraiser in Delaware for then Sen. Joe Biden (right) in 1978. Despite their close bond, Biden held off on endorsing Carter ahead of the 1980 election, fearing the president wouldn’t be able to overcome low poll numbers and inflation
Now 44 years later, President Joe Biden is also facing discouraging poll numbers as Americans continue to feel the impacts of inflation, however his White House and political allies have gone after Democrats who have questioned if he should run for a second term
Now, 44 years later, Biden is also facing discouraging poll numbers, as Americans continue to feel the impacts of inflation.
The Democrats who have publicly spoken out about their Biden reelection fears have faced criticism from the White House and other members of their party.
For instance, longtime Democratic strategist James Carville was told by Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman this week to ‘shut the f*** up,’ after sounding the alarm for months that 2024 is shaping up differently than 2020.
Carville had warned that Biden has to contend with both third-party candidates – including Kennedy scion, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and academic Cornel West – and a less enthusiastic Democratic base.
David Axelrod, who helped President Barack Obama win the White House in 2008, was met with similar fury when he voiced doubts about Biden running again, mostly due to the president’s advanced age.
And Rep. Dean Phillips, who like self-help guru Marianne Williamson is mounting a primary challenge against Biden, has been met with disdain ever since he announced his presidential bid in late October.
But in the Carter era, Biden was comfortable playing public critic.
Elected to the Senate in 1972, the president faced his first reelection battle in 1978, during Carter’s one White House term.
Carter biographers told The Wall Street Journal that Biden often benefited from positioning himself to the right of the president.
And Biden’s 1978 Senate reelection bid centered around fighting inflation.
‘The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,’ Biden said in a full-page ad placed in the Wilmington Morning News in October 1978, weeks before the midterm elections. ‘We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.’
Biden was also publicly critical of Carter’s staff.
Then Sen. Joe Biden (left) stands with President Jimmy Carter (center) at the White House in June 1977. Carter assisted Biden with the senator’s 1978 reelection bid, but Biden was slow to endorse Carter when he ran for reelection against Ronald Reagan in 1980
President Joe Biden (right) and first lady Jill Biden (left) visited President Jimmy Carter (center left) and first lady Rosalyn Carter (center right) at their home in Plains, Georgia in April 2021
President Jimmy Carter, age 99, is seen at his wife Rosalyn Carter’s funeral last month in Atlanta. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden attended the memorial service alongside President Bill Clinton and several former first ladies
‘The president is learning, but not fast enough,’ Biden said in October 1977 at a Delaware State Chamber of Commerce dinner, according to the Wilmington Morning News. ‘Everything was important to his neophyte staff and therefore nothing was important.’
Additionally, Biden complained that Carter’s staff was so unresponsive that the only person he could get on the phone was the president, The Journal said.
Biden’s public commentary didn’t plague his relationship with Carter, who headlined two fundraisers for the Delaware senator in February 1978, including a $1,000-per-couple event at Wilmington’s historic Hotel DuPont.
Carter ‘went to very, very few fundraisers’ for members of Congress, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy chief, told The Journal. ‘So this was a recognition of what Joe would have done for him and their friendship during the White House years.’
Yet Biden’s public criticism of Carter continued.
When Carter reshuffled his cabinet in 1979, Biden called the move ‘amateurish.’
Biden was also critical of Carter when the president dismissed feminist Bella Azug from her post on the president’s National Advisory Committee on Women, saying that the role of a president ‘is to deal with he major splintered coalitions in America, in a way that can make it work.’
‘I think that’s part of Jimmy Carter’s problem,’ Biden said in February 1979, according to the Wilmington News Journal. ‘You’ve got to learn how to deal with the Bella Abzugs.’
Eventually Biden came around and endorsed Carter – and gave the president a heads up that Sen. Ted Kennedy planned to challenge him for the Democratic nomination, The Journal reported.
And in campaigning for him, Biden used a similar argument that he often makes about himself: ‘Don’t compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative.’
‘Let’s face it, Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the second coming,’ Biden said in April 1980, according to the Wilmington Morning News. ‘But he is doing a good job.’
Several months later, when Democrats grew increasingly worried the incumbent president couldn’t beat rising Republican star Ronald Reagan and there was talk of having an open Democratic convention, Biden talked to other Democratic senators and doused water on that plan.
‘Not one saw anything to be gained in dumping Carter,’ Biden said, according to an August 1980 piece in the Sacramento Bee, The Journal reported.
In November, Reagan beat Carter in a landslide, earning 50.8 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent, and 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s 49.