No. of Recommendations: 3
The similarities in their predicaments are illuminating. There's a lot of upside for Biden if he voluntarily relinquishes the reigns.
This is a great article by young political commentator Gabe Fleisher:
wakeuptopolitics.com - Is this bidens lbj momentThe book Gabe references also seems like a must read for all, especially Biden!
An excerpt from the article:
But I was there yesterday visiting a friend, so I decided to quickly stop into the local bookstore (shout-out Bridge Street Books!) I used to frequent as a student. I was browsing in the history section when a book poking out of the shelf stopped me in my tracks: “The Thirty-First of March” by Horace Busby.
In case you aren’t caught up on your Caro, I’ll explain why the book immediately intrigued me: Busby was one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest advisers. And March 31, 1968, was the date that Johnson announced he wouldn’t be running for another term.
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Just as Barack Obama and George W. Bush have seen their approval ratings rise after leaving elective politics, Biden might be surprised by how much unity a president can command — something he craves, by all accounts — once they walk out the door. “Everyone in the world thinks you would do anything to hang on to power,” Busby advised Johnson. “That impression has colored the whole public reaction to your presidency. I personally feel that if you take this step it will help in the long term for people to see better all that you have accomplished in your administration.”
Conversely, if he hangs in, all anyone will want to talk about is the debate, the polls, the party division, for the next four months, a never-ending parade of second-guessing whether Biden should have quit, whether his decision was borne of selfishness. If he defies the polls and wins, he’ll be historic. But if he loses, he might be remembered as little more than the Trump era’s Benjamin Harrison.
Although, in the moment, it seems like nothing is more important than the debate and the concerns about his age, if he steps down now, it’s possible that the 2024 election will be airbrushed from his legacy entirely. In Johnson’s case, his anointed successor lost to Nixon, but I would argue that the 1968 election — because he stepped away from it — doesn’t really figure much into how he’s remembered by historians.
Instead, his presidency is largely regarded for its legislative successes (and the morass of Vietnam). In a 2021 C-SPAN survey of historians, Johnson was ranked as the 11th-best president in history. He was give the No. 2 spot in not one, but two, categories: “relations with Congress” and “pursued equal justice for all.” For Biden, who has also centered legislative and racial progress during his presidency, a legacy like that probably doesn’t sound too bad right about now.
These are the arguments that Pelosi and Schumer — if not his paid advisers — are surely making to Biden, just as Busby made them to Johnson.
In case you couldn’t tell, a high political melodrama is playing out in Washington (and Rehoboth Beach) right now. Factions are surely forming, just as they did in Johnson’s White House. Questions of legacy, and mission, and mortality are floating around the presidential quarantine, as the window closes for Biden to write his own ending, as Johnson did, rather than risk being dragged out, as Johnson feared.
“Tonight is better than tomorrow night,” John Connally, the governor of Texas (who agreed with Busby), told Johnson at one point. “And last night would have been better than tonight, because time is running out.”
Just like for Johnson — who told Busby that he wouldn’t know if he would drop out “until I get to the last line of my speech on the teleprompter” — this decision might came down to the final minute, after hours of intense debate, full of emotion. On March 31, for Johnson, “twenty years [in politics] were coming down to a single day,” as Busby put it. For Biden, it’s more like fifty — plus, in his mind, the future of democracy.
We don’t know what’s being said in those closed-door conversations — for that, we may have to wait for Mike Donilon’s forthcoming tell-all, “The Twenty-First of July” (exact date to be determined). Until then, we can only look to history, hoping to glimpse for answers. 