A Polk or a Johnson

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor B y now, I’m sure you’ve heard there has been a slight change in the 2024 presidential race. Yes, President Joe Biden announced over the weekend that he would, after several weeks of speculation, not be seeking the Democratic nomination and not be seeking a second term this November.

It’s an unusual move, but not an unprecedented one. Now, I’m sure you know that there have been several one-term presidents throughout U.S. History, but it is definitely rare for one where the incumbent president has simply decided not to seek re-election.

As I am a history guy, complete with degree in it, I am really, really into presidential elections. And a couple that stick out to me here are the Election of 1848 and the Election of 1968. I’ll start with the 1848 election, since none of you were around at the time (and Trump and Biden were pretty young … cue snare drum … pause for laughter).

So, in the Election of 1844, James K. Polk was a “dark horse” candidate that wasn’t even being considered for the presidency at the time of the Democratic Convention. Sound familiar? One of the names being floated around was Martin Van Buren, who had already been a one-term president a few elections earlier. Also sounds familiar, right?

Well, in 1844, after several rounds of nominations, Polk’s name got thrown in the hat and he accepted the nomination with a very simple platform of four major goals: Annexing Texas and California from Mexico, lowering the tariffs, creating an independent federal treasury and acquiring Oregon from Great Britain. Having done all that in his four years in office, he declined a second term. As such, he is considered one of the more successful (albeit not so well known) U.S. presidents.

Contrast that with what happened in 1868. In 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson was elected Vice President under President John F. Kennedy. Many of you were around for that one, or at least came along soon after and I’m sure you know how that ended … with JFK’s death at the hands of an assassin (Fortunately, I was a couple of inches away from being able to throw in another “sounds familiar” here).

So Johnson became president. He then went on to win a full term of his own in 1964. And because he had only served about a year of Kennedy’s term, he could have run for re-election in 1968. However, he did not. There were a number of contributing factors to him bowing out in ’68, but most of them concern the Vietnam War, America’s changing attitude toward the conflict and the changing public opinion of LBJ as a result of the whole deal.

And with that, Johnson gave his famous address in which he told the nation, “I will not seek, nor will I accept another term as your president … If nominated I will not run. If elected I will not serve.” This, of course, led to the return or Richard Nixon back to the national scene (he had been Vice President from 1953 to 1960 under Eisenhower), and Nixon won in 1968. Of course, if you know history, you also know that he might have been out of luck if Robert F. Kennedy had not been assassinated during the primary season that spring. Wow, another Kennedy … history really does repeat itself.

In any event, you have two very different one-term presidents. Polk basically did a “mic drop” and left office with nothing left to prove, while Johnson was seen by many as a quitter who walked out on the nation at one of its darkest hours and allowed a crooked politician who had already lost a presidential election to get into office (wow … it’s just like a reboot or something).

So where will history place Biden’s lone term as Commander in Chief? Probably somewhere in between JKP and LBJ. He definitely did some good, particularly in job growth and infrastructure. He didn’t do much with foreign relations and of course, the inflation of 2023 will definitely get pinned on him. He did help us get past COVID-19 (a little ironic, I guess, that he ended his 2024 bid while in isolation with the virus).

Maybe at the convention, we’ll get another James K. Polk situation? Eh, we’ll more than likely get Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, and who knows as the vice presidential nominee. And of course, if Trump wins in November, he’ll be only the second president to ever serve two non-consecutive terms, so a little more history could be getting ready to repeat, thus robbing Grover Cleveland of the only thing that really made him noteworthy as president.