Biden at year one: More Ford than Carter (or FDR)

At first, with landmark legislation (and maybe even the pandemic) passing, the president seemed determined to prove he was no ordinary Joe.

In fact, with robust COVID-relief and an actual bipartisan infrastructure package passed, a mass vaccine campaign taking off along with the economy, some pundits compared President Joe Biden with another Democrat looking to transform and reassure a shaken nation: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But nowadays, amid a surge in infections and inflation and international crises involving Iran, Russia and elsewhere, some pundits and several congressional critics are comparing Biden to a less-celebrated Democrat: Jimmy Carter.

While any comparison is complex — there's a bit of several presidential predecessors in any incumbent — the presidential parallel that seems most similar to Biden is actually Gerald Ford.

After all, both Biden and Ford came into office after scandal-scarred presidents. Ford, after Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate. Biden, after winning a close, but clear, victory over Donald Trump, whose denial and defiance of the election results culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Both Ford and Biden stressed unity among Americans and their elected representatives. For Ford, it was his defining dynamic, summed up in the title of his autobiography: "A Time to Heal."

"Definitely the comparison with Joe Biden is to Gerald Ford," agreed Douglas Brinkley, who himself wrote a biography of the 38^th president. Brinkley, a prominent presidential historian who is a professor of history at Rice University, said that while Carter was a one-term governor of Georgia, both Biden and Ford were Washington institutions — Ford in the House, Biden in the Senate. Both led by bipartisan instincts and being likable. "They built their careers not as power brokers, but as healers, unifiers, the outstretched hand, the slap on the back," Brinkley said.

If Ford's goal was healing, Biden's seems to be to make sure the wound doesn't worsen, incanting in his campaign and presidency that he's "fighting for the soul of the nation."

But so too is Trump, who in his post-presidency is the anti-Nixon, opting not to become a relative recluse in San Clemente but being ever available from Mar-a-Lago to marginalize Republicans deemed disloyal and endorse acolytes in Republican primaries — perhaps before he enters the presidential contests in 2024.

"If there's one big difference it's that the polarization we see today was only just in its infancy in Ford's time," said Scott Kaufman, also a Ford biographer. Kaufman, chair of the department of history at Francis Marion University, added that when Nixon left office "he really lacked a following; Republicans were ready to impeach him. Whereas in the case of Trump, he leaves office with a party that in many ways feels like they have to do his bidding."

After the acrimony of the Nixon and Trump eras, Ford and Biden both had honeymoons, Kaufman noted, with Ford's cut short due to his early pardoning of Nixon and Biden's curtailed because "Biden comes into office with a polarized nation, a Republican Party that's determined to stand against him, a Republican leadership in the Senate that's made it very clear it will take advantage of every opportunity it has to stall or prevent passage of his legislation."

It's not just the GOP. This past week's failed bid to pass voting-rights legislation and a filibuster-busting method to do it showed Democratic divisions among their minimal majority, where ideological differences between Manchin-Sinema centrists and the Sanders-Warren wing of progressives can stop progress, too. Ford never had a Republican majority in Congress to work with, and Kaufman said that he ascended to the presidency "as the Republican Party is beginning to show signs of division. You have this growing neoconservative movement building" that "is going to begin moving the party to the right. That's not who Ford was."

In fact, Ford was more moderate. As was Biden. But at times he's heeded the base's lurch to the left and added to polarization that defines our times. Indeed, Biden's era doesn't seem to be a time to heal, but a time to conspicuously pick at America's sociopolitical scab so there's no time to heal.

There are other striking parallels between the presidencies beyond following impeached (Trump) or about-to-be impeached (Nixon) leaders. Ford and Biden both oversaw chaotic withdrawals from unpopular wars, right down to iconic images of helicopters ferrying Americans and (not enough) allies out of collapsing countries — Ford with Vietnam and Biden with Afghanistan. Both seemed helpless if not hapless in responding to inflation, with Ford sporting "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons and Biden trying to term the scourge transitory, when evidence and economists mostly suggest it will endure. And both struggled to contend with communicable disease: Ford with swine flu and Biden with the coronavirus, a crisis of scale and scope scores beyond swine flu.

Both were gaffe prone (gaffe prolific, really), especially when it came to Russian aggression. Ford (in)famously claimed in a presidential debate that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration" (to which the moderator, Max Frankel of the New York Times, replied, "I'm sorry, what?"). And just this week Biden indicated that a "minor incursion" by Russia into Ukraine could mean a more moderate response, alarming Western allies and the West Wing, which scrambled to clarify.

Yet misspeaking seemed to make Ford and Biden even more human and accessible, traits that served both well. Ford's University of Michigan gridiron grit yielded to gentility in his political and personal life. He had "an All-American family," Kaufman said. "Here's a guy with his sleeves rolled up, who enjoyed watching football, big sports fan, skier, handsome family, they all seemed to get along well." Both first ladies were/are great assets, Brinkley added, although warning that if Republicans take control of Congress "they're going to make a big deal out of Hunter Biden."

Ford's pardon of Nixon may have cost him the '76 election, but won him belated, if lasting accolades, including the 2001 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for "his courage in making a controversial decision of conscience to pardon" Nixon. Biden, conversely, may face Trump again should both men decide to run.

Ford did run and lost to Carter in a race that was closer than 2020. But Ford, the healer, gracefully conceded and moved on. "I think he is unfairly called a caretaker; I think he was more than that," said Kaufman. Mentioning several policy accomplishments and even the pardon, which "was probably the right thing to do," Kaufman said that while Ford was a Republican, "he was not an ideologue."

Biden, Brinkley said, was more elected as a "placeholder." Someone who "could unify the party to stop Donald Trump. And he's fulfilled that role. But the idea that you can have a New Deal or Great Society [agenda] when you barely have control over the Senate and House, it's just not doable." 2020, Brinkley added, "wasn't a mandate election."

Indeed, just as with Ford, Biden's presidency — at least based on year one — seems more transitional than transformative.

John Rash is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. The Rash Report can be heard at 8:10 a.m. Fridays on WCCO Radio, 830-AM. On Twitter: @rashreport.