8 November 2020 — 1828 mst

America opts for dignity and decency

Joe Biden becomes the fifth man and fourth Democrat
since 1896 to defeat a first term incumbent president

President-elect Joe Biden, also is the seventh vice president since 1896 to become president, and only the third to be elected instead of replacing a president who died in office.

First, the incumbent presidents who lost re-election bids:

• William Howard Taft lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912, ending 16 years of Republican occupancy of the White House than began in 1897 with William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901. Theodore Roosevelt, at 42 the youngest man to become president, declined to run for re-election. Under Warren G. Harding, Taft became chief justice of the supreme court. He was the only man to serve as president and chief justice — and is the precedent for Biden's appointing Obama to the supreme court.


• Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge’s commerce secretary, lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, ending 12 years of Republican presidents that began in 1921 with Warren G. Harding, who died in 1923. His vice president, Coolidge won the 1924 election, but did not run for re-election in 1928. He died at age 60 in 1933.


• Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. In 1976, Carter defeated Gerald Ford, who was appointed vice president after Spiro Agnew, who was taking bribes, resigned in 1973, and became president 1974 following Richard Nixon's resignation. Ford was the only unelected president.


• George H.W. Bush lost to William J. Clinton in 1992, ending 12 years of Republican rule that began with Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980.


• Donald J. Trump lost to former two-term Vice President Joe Biden in 2020. Biden joins Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush as the only men who served two full terms of vice president before becoming president. He joins Ronald Reagen as the only men since 1896 who defeated an incumbent in his first term following eight years of the opposite party’s occupancy of the White House.

All the vice presidents since 1896 who became president:

• Theodore Roosevelt became president after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. He won the presidential election of 1904, declined to run in 1908, and ran as a "Bull Moose" third party candidate in 1912. Taft, the Republican nominee, and Roosevelt, split the conservative vote, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win with 42 percent of the popular vote and 82 percent of the electoral vote.


• Calvin Coolidge became president in 1923 following Warren G. Harding's death. He won the election of 1924, but did not run in 1928.


• Harry S. Truman became president in 1945 following the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He won the election of 1948, but did not run again in 1962.


• Richard Nixon served as Eisenhower’s vice president from 1953 to 1961. He lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Eight years later, he won the presidency by defeating Hubert H. Humphrey, who was Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president 1965–1969. Nixon, who declared "I am not a crook," resigned in 1974 because the Watergate scandal proved he was a crook. Nixon and FDR are the only men to have run five times for nationwide office. Nixon ran twice for the vice presidency, three times for the presidency. FDR lost the 1920 vice presidential election, but won the presidential elections of 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944.


• Lyndon Baines Johnson became president after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. He won the election of 1964 in a huge landslide. He ended his 1968 re-election campaign when his prosecution of the war in Vietnam tore apart the Democratic party. I listened to his speech declaring he would neither seek or accept the Democratic nomination as I drove home with friends after we spent a week campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in the Wisconsin primary.


• George H.W. Bush served as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, 1981–1989, then won the presidential election of 1988. He lost to William J. Clinton in 1992.


• Joe Biden, Barack Obama's vice president 2009–2017, defeated Donald J. Trump in 2020, rescuing the nation from an incompetent, dangerous, sociopath and personality cult leader who bungled the coronavirus response and made the United States an object of international disrepute.

If Trump is still alive in 2024, not a certainty given his age and unhealthy habits, he could run again. Right wing pundit and Trump worshipper Hugh Hewitt says he should. Were he to win, he would join Democrat Grover Cleveland as the only men to serve two nonconsecutive presidential terms.

Will Trump run again? I doubt it. He’s going to be in legal hot water up to his cojones, maybe higher, and will lose support as the nation learns more about his disastrous presidency and grifting ways.

Joe Biden accepted his president-elect status with a gracious speech, premised on the truth that our nation will endure only if it shares common goals, ideas, and values, that appealed to our better angles . He promised to be a president for all Americans, not just the Americans who voted for him. After four years of working to bring us together again, after comporting himself with dignity and decency, especially decency, our nation will be in no mood to revert to Trump’s politics of hatred, division, and incompetence.

We now face four years of hard work and difficult reconciliation, but also four years of peace, laughter, joy, and prosperity. I can live with that. All of us can. And in time, aware that we narrowly avoided our democracy’s death, I believe all of us will because we must to survive as a strong liberal democracy.

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Text reviewed and corrected on 12 November 2020.