Sid Salter
- Columnist Sid Salter writes that the choices eventually made by women and independent voters are still the likely margin in what remains a close race.
The easy political comparison to President Joe Biden’s decision to with withdraw from the 2024 U.S. presidential race is to point to incumbent Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s decision not to seek the presidential nomination of his party in the 1968 campaign.
While that comparison would be reasonably accurate, it would not reflect the rather stunning differences between the decisions made by those two presidents.
Mired in the national division over the conduct of the Vietnam War and under political attack from both the Republican Party and his fellow Democrats, LBJ was 59 years old when he withdrew from the 1968 campaign. Biden is 81.
While burdened with poor physical health and what biographers and wife Lady Bird Johnson would confirm was a pervasive battle with anxiety and depression (mostly about his physical health and fear of his health leading to incapacitation), Johnson’s cognitive abilities and mental acuity were not in question.
President Harry S. Truman declined to seek re-election in March 1952. The decision was tied to the Korean War and corruption scandals in the Truman administration.
Johnson withdrew months before the 1968 Democratic Convention. The 1968 election was rocked by the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis and later Robert F. Kennedy Sr. in Los Angeles. Biden withdrew less than a month before the 2024 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Biden’s decision came just days after a failed assassination attempt on the life of GOP nominee former President Donald Trump.
The repercussions of Biden’s withdrawal will evolve throughout the 2024 campaign, but Trump is ahead in the current polls and Democratic Party uncertainty helps his campaign.
Yet the 1968 campaign is not a compelling comparison to our current political reality as a nation. A look at the 1920 presidential campaign reveals compelling, almost startling similarities.
President Woodrow Wilson, a liberal Democrat known for leading the nation through World War I, for the formation of the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) and changed the nation’s economy with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the imposition of the modern income tax, served as president from 1913until 1921.
While preparing to seek a third term in office, Wilson suffered a stroke in Oct. of 1919 that incapacitated the president. His second wife, Edith, who he married while in the White House, exhibited significant control along with two trusted physicians over access to Wilson and what documents were discussed or presented to him. Many historians, some seriously, referred to First Lady Edith Wilson as “the first female president of the United States.”
The nation’s political climate in 1920 and 2024 is likewise similar. After 116,000 Americans were killed in World War I, fighting continued in a place called Ukraine.
Along with the First World War, Wilson also led the U.S. through a global Spanish influenza pandemic that claimed a reported 675,000 American lives. After WWI, the American economy bounced between recession and inflation. Immigration – an issue tied to health and financial fears – was a divisive issue in presidential politics as it is today.
Despite a desire to run for a third term, Wilson stood down and stepped aside in 1920. The Democrats nominated then-Ohio Gov. James Middleton Cox (father of the Cox Enterprises media empire) and a young New York Navy Department administrator named Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Republicans nominated Ohio U.S. Sen. Warren Harding and Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge. With the Cox-Roosevelt ticket stuck with defending Wilson’s unpopular policies after a war, a pandemic, and dire economic troubles, the Harding-Coolidge tickets won in a landslide despite the presence of the famously un-effervescent “Silent Cal.”
Despite the tsunami of change in the 2024 presidential election in the last 10 days – from the attempt on Trump’s life to Biden’s withdrawal from the campaign – the choices eventually made by women and independent voters are still the likely margin in what remains a close race.
