It all started, as the most exciting moments in Western thought tend to do, with a provocative but well-argued column in Slate. The column in question was Zachary D. Carter’s Monday piece about Joe Biden’s approval ratings, which made the case that the president’s unpopularity likely cannot be fully explained by ongoing inflation, the overall level of price increases during his term, or reductions in voters’ purchasing power. While these economic issues may be significant, Carter showed, other recent presidents have overseen empirically worse conditions without being nearly as unpopular as Biden is.
What, then, explains Biden’s weakness? Carter speculates that a lingering COVID hangover is to blame, both in statistically tangible terms—home ownership has become completely unattainable for many people because of the housing price spike that began in 2020, which could make them feel like the economy isn’t working even if employment and wages are high—and via the enduring consequences, large and small, of pandemic-era death and disruption.
Well, former FiveThirtyEight editor Nate Silver didn’t like that suggestion, and sent a not very friendly tweet about it:
(Carter did not blame Biden’s low approval ratings on housing policy. He merely suggested that home prices may contribute to negative feelings about economic conditions.)
Silver wrote a few more tweets about the subject, with one of them arguing that Biden should have decided in 2023 not to run again so that Democrats could have held a competitive primary. New York Times reporter and Run-Up podcast host Astead Herndon replied to that like so:
And that’s when things started to turn into the scene in the Western where everyone is punching each other and shooting the chandeliers and knocking out the piano player with a flower pot. Raw Story’s Matthew Chapman called the idea that Biden had committed to serving only one term a “myth,” and Semafor’s Dave Weigel quoted Chapman while bringing up the Mandela effect, which is so named for people who swear they remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison even though that didn’t happen:
While roughly a billion Democratic reply guys were getting into Herndon’s mentions to call him a liar, Weigel’s colleague Jordan Weissmann hopped into Weigel’s replies to post an article he (Weissmann) wrote, when he worked for Slate in 2019, about Biden “signaling,” if not quite promising, that he’d only serve one term. Concurrent to all this, Silver was arguing with Substack’s Matt Yglesias—typically his ally in nominally evidence-based trolling of the progressive left—about Yglesias’ contention that Silver (and Herndon) are giving too much credence to voters’ claims that they’re concerned about Biden’s age. As Yglesias notes, incumbent leaders—including young ones—in nearly every other inflation-besieged democracy are unpopular too:
This would imply that Yglesias doesn’t think the one-term promise or “signal” is a factor either, though he doesn’t say as much.
Where does the truth lie? Slate will be glad to settle this issue, having started it. It is true, as Herndon and Weissmann wrote, that Politico ran a piece in late 2019 under the headline “Biden Signals to Aides That He Would Serve Only a Single Term.” That piece includes the following assertion, attributed to an anonymous adviser: “If Biden is elected, he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”
Fair enough. But the piece also includes this quote, attributed to another Biden adviser: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.” And Biden personally told reporters that Politico’s report wasn’t accurate the same morning it was published.
Some one-term truthers also cite a March 2020 speech in which Biden called himself a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders. Here’s what he said specifically: “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
So did Biden promise or pledge or signal that he would be a one-term president? No, not explicitly. A bridge can be short, like the world’s shortest international bridge, or long, like … various other bridges. As I said Tuesday, it’s really most appropriate to say that the president “floated” serving one term before backing away from the idea. It was also spelled “Berenstein Bears” before we switched dimensions. Glad I could get this all sorted out for everyone!