Contrary to popular belief, the vice presidency is not a great ticket to the Oval Office. Only 29% of vice presidents have gotten there, and nearly two-thirds of those became president due to the previous president dying or resigning.
A vice president who doesn’t succeed to the presidency due to a death or resignation has about a 1-in-10 chance of actually getting there.
A popular notion on Twitter these days is that Joe Biden, should he win the presidency this fall, will only serve one term and, therefore, whoever he selects as his vice president will have the inside track on the Democratic nomination, and the presidency, in 2024.
We’ll set aside, for a moment, a discussion of the myth that running for the presidency as a sitting vice president gives anyone a leg up. (History shows that most sitting vice presidents don’t even get nominated for the presidency, much less win; only four ever have, and only one of those since 1836. But that’s another topic that I plan to cover as part of another post soon.)
Today’s post will focus on the widely circulated belief that Biden is running purely to get Trump out of office and, due to his advanced age, will not seek a second term if elected this November.
Well, sure. It’s possible. But it’s highly unlikely.
It must be said: we never know what is in a person’s mind unless they tell us. But Biden hasn’t made any such pledge, so his course of action in 2024, if elected in 2020, can only be guessed at. And there are a lot more reasons to guess that he will seek a second term than there are to expect that he won’t.
The truth is that it takes a certain kind of personality to run for president. It’s a huge job that requires an insane amount of striving to get. It also requires a pretty large ego–anybody who really thinks he or she is the best person to hold the most powerful job in the world must have an extremely high opinion of oneself. Anyone who makes it to the White House has generally has spent a significant part of his adult life building toward that moment. For whatever reason, they want the power and the prestige of the presidency, whether for altruistic reasons or for purely egotistical ones.
People who put so much time, and so much of their heart and soul, for so many years, into becoming president are not likely to step away from their lifelong dream voluntarily. It is no coincidence that so many rulers in other, less democratic countries end up staying on for life. Honestly, where do you go, and what do you do, after you have been the head of state of the most powerful country on earth? What can compare? Do you think Bill Clinton doesn’t wake up every day feeling a little bored and thinking wistfully about the job he once held? (Asked in the early 2000s if he would have sought a third term, had it been constitutional, Clinton responded candidly: “I’d have made y’all throw me out.”)
In America, it became customary for presidents to seek no more than two terms due to the example set by President George Washington. Ultimately, after Franklin Roosevelt broke with this tradition by successfully seeking a third term in 1940 (and a fourth in 1944), Congress and the states enacted the 22nd Amendment codifying the two-term limit into law–although it is instructive that Congress quite pointedly did not apply any term limits to itself. Congressmen like power and prestige, too. They might not mind limiting someone else’s terms, but they’ll gladly hang out in Washington for 40 years if they can, thank you very much.
Since the passage of the 22nd Amendment, only two presidents have voluntarily stepped aside while still eligible to run for reelection. Harry Truman, who was not covered by the amendment due to having already been in office when it passed, chose not to run in 1952. But Truman had already served almost two full terms, taking over the presidency just three months into Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth term in 1945 and then winning the presidency in his own right in 1948. Truman may have had the least ambition for the presidency of anyone who has sought the office in the last century, steadfastly resisting the offer of the vice presidency in 1944 until essentially commanded by Roosevelt to accept for the good of the Democratic Party. So perhaps he would have chosen to step aside in 1952 even if his approval ratings hadn’t sunk to 22%. We’ll never know–but remember, he had essentially already served two full terms, and with the Republican Party set to nominate General Dwight Eisenhower, Truman would have had to be remarkably optimistic–or stupid–to expect that he would win.
Lyndon Johnson, in his sixth year in the Oval Office, withdrew from the 1968 presidential race, claiming that the country needed him to focus on the Vietnam War rather than running another campaign. This self-serving statement of martyrdom by an intensely vain, power-hungry man who would have sold his own mother into slavery to be president doesn’t meet the smell test. Johnson was badly wounded by his support of the unpopular war in Vietnam, and shortly after an obscure anti-war senator won 42% against him in the New Hampshire primary–a shocking testament to his political vulnerability that showed the writing was on the wall–Johnson bowed out. But again, he had served about a term and a half.
You’d have to go all the way back to 1880 to find a president who voluntarily stepped away after only one term. That was Rutherford B. Hayes, a mediocre president who had been elected under the most divisive and frankly shady circumstances in the history of U.S. presidential elections. No president in the last 140 years has voluntarily chosen not to run for reelection after just four years in office.
And some presidents hung on to their offices even during severe health crises that made it impossible for them to do their jobs properly, or at all. For all the talk about how Biden will probably forego a second term if he has health issues, consider two examples of how presidents will hang on by their fingernails even during the worst health crises.
EXAMPLE 1: Franklin Roosevelt accepted renomination in 1944 even though he was clearly dying of acute congestive heart failure. He had been ordered by his physician not to work more than four hours a day–an extremely light work schedule for a president in the middle of a world war. His condition was so well-known by key insiders that party elders knew the 1944 Democratic convention was selecting two presidents, not one, as documented in the Truman biography by David McCullough.
One response to this observation is that FDR stayed on because the country needed continuity in wartime, but whether he had stood for reelection or not, it was likely that there would be a change in leadership one way or the other. This is, of course, exactly what happened, as FDR died 82 days into his fourth term, months before the war ended. Whether his doctors told him explicitly of his prognosis is not known, but surely Roosevelt knew his condition was grave, having had a type of seizure shortly before accepting his 1944 renomination by radio linkup.
EXAMPLE 2: President Woodrow Wilson, half his body paralyzed after a pair of strokes and an embolism, actively conspired with his wife Edith to deceive Congress and his own cabinet about the seriousness of his condition. After his devastating second stroke in September 1919, Edith Wilson took on the president’s duties while blocking access to the president to obscure his inability to do his job. His physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, blatantly lied, claiming after the first stroke that the president had taken ill with influenza. The country went on like this for the final 18 months of Wilson’s second term.
Ego-driven leaders who have risen to the height of power simply do not part with that power unless they absolutely have to–due to term limits, losing an election, or impending defeat in an upcoming election. Nobody can read Biden’s mind, or know what he would do if hit with a serious health crisis.
But those who are counting on him to serve only one term, and hoping their own preferred candidate will become the heir apparent in 2024, should learn from history that they shouldn’t count on it.
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