President Joe Biden hesitated to back President Jimmy Carter for a second term as the Democrat faced worrying polls and high inflation.
The Wall Street Journal reported this on Thursday to comments Biden made in 1979, as Carter prepared for re-election.
“That man is in trouble, in trouble politically,” Biden said at the time, according to comments in the Wilmington Evening Journal.
The U.S. senator from Delaware said he postponed endorsing Carter because he wanted to back a candidate who could keep the White House for Democrats in 1980.
“I'm not sure this is Jimmy Carter,” Biden told his local newspaper.
President Jimmy Carter (left) appears at a fundraiser in Delaware for then-Senator Joe Biden (right) in 1978. Despite their close relationship, Biden hesitated to endorse Carter before the 1980 election, fearing the president would not be able to do so. overcome low poll numbers and inflation
Now, 44 years later, President Joe Biden also faces discouraging polling as Americans continue to feel the effects of inflation, but his White House and political allies have gone after Democrats who questioned whether he should run for a second term.
Now, 44 years later, Biden also faces discouraging poll numbers as Americans continue to feel the effects of inflation.
Democrats who have spoken publicly about their fears of Biden's re-election have faced criticism from the White House and other members of their party.
For example, former Democratic strategist James Carville was told this week by Democratic Senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania to 'shut his mouth', after months of sounding the alarm that 2024 will develop differently than 2020.
Carville had warned that Biden faces 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 anger when he expressed doubts about Biden running again, especially because of the president's advanced age.
And Rep. Dean Phillips, who like self-help guru Marianne Williamson is mounting a primary challenge to Biden, has been met with disdain since announcing his presidential bid in late October.
But in the Carter era, Biden was comfortable as a public critic.
The president was elected to the Senate in 1972 and faced his first reelection battle in 1978, during Carter's only term in the White House.
Carter biographers told The Wall Street Journal that Biden often benefited from positioning himself to the president's right.
And Biden's 1978 Senate re-election bid focused on fighting inflation.
“The rising costs of inflation are seeping into the fabric of American society,” Biden said in a full-page ad in the Wilmington Morning News in October 1978, weeks before the midterm elections. “We need to get 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 Senator Joe Biden (left) stands with President Jimmy Carter (center) at the White House in June 1977. Carter assisted Biden in the senator's 1978 reelection bid, but Biden was slow to endorse Carter when he ran for reelection against Ronald Reagan in 1978. 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, 99, appears at his wife Rosalyn Carter's funeral in Atlanta last month. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden attended the memorial service, along with President Bill Clinton and several former first ladies
“The president is learning, but not fast enough,” Biden said in October 1977 at a dinner at the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, according to the Wilmington Morning News. “Everything was important to his starting staff, so nothing was important.”
In addition, Biden complained that Carter's staff was so unresponsive that the only person he could get on the phone was the president, according to the Journal.
Biden's public comments did not negatively impact 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 an acknowledgment 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 fired feminist Bella Azug from her position on the president's National Advisory Committee on Women, saying the role of a president “is to deal with the great splintered coalitions in America, on a way that can make it work.'
“I think that's part of the Jimmy Carter problem,” Biden said in February 1979, according to the Wilmington News Journal. “You have to learn how to deal with the Bella Abzugs.”
Ultimately, Biden came around and endorsed Carter — and signaled to the president that Sen. Ted Kennedy planned to challenge him for the Democratic nomination, The Journal reported.
And when campaigning for him, Biden used a similar argument he often makes about himself: “Don't compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative.'
“Let's face it, Jimmy Carter isn't the best thing since wheat biscuits; he is not the second coming,” Biden said in April 1980, according to the Wilmington Morning News. “But he's doing well.”
Several months later, as Democrats grew increasingly concerned that the incumbent president would not be able to defeat rising Republican star Ronald Reagan and there was talk of an open Democratic convention, Biden met with other Democratic senators and poured water on that plan.
“Nobody saw that there was anything to be gained from dumping Carter,” Biden said, according to an August 1980 piece in the Sacramento Bee, The Journal reported.
In November, Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide, earning 50.8 percent of the vote to Carter's 41 percent, and 489 Electoral College votes to Carter's 49.
