Biden Is a Ford Democrat

Their milquetoast personalities allowed them to restore a democracy badly battered by their predecessors

It can’t be easy to succeed a disgraced president who left behind a troubled economy, a disastrous war in a distant country, a Justice Department saddled with a legacy of vindictive politicization, and a poisonous national political atmosphere. Joe Biden knows all this from experience. But so did another modern president: Gerald Ford, who became president in 1974 after the resignation of Richard Nixon. His similarities to Biden go well beyond the obvious ones. You’ve heard of Reagan Democrats? Biden may be understood as the first Ford Democrat.

Not a Republican Hero

Ford, like Biden, was a grizzled veteran of Congress who seemed fated never to rise higher. He had earned a reputation not as a bold leader but as a skilled, pragmatic legislator who understood how to attain bipartisan compromise. Coming from his party’s moderate wing, President Ford didn’t excite his party’s base voters, who regarded him as insufficiently ideological, particularly compared to Ronald Reagan, who, having served as governor of California, had already established himself as the hero of the party. Ford’s physical stumbles made him the butt of “Saturday Night Live” skits in which Chevy Chase portrayed the former Michigan football star as a hopeless klutz. 

But now Ford, who died in 2006, is the subject of a massive new biography, An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Like and Historic Presidency of Gerald Ford by Richard Norton Smith, a presidential historian. (Full disclosure: Norton Smith is a longtime friend.) 

But while reading the book, I was struck by the parallels between Ford and Biden.

As the book documents, the 38th president compiled a long list of concrete achievements, many of which earned him tepid applause, if any, at the time. And his public spiritedness and basic decency—a contrast with his predecessor, Richard Nixon—did much to repair the battered democracy that Ford inherited. 

In all this, he more resembles Biden than he does the modern leaders of his own Republican Party. 

Ford rose when the GOP tent was large enough to include not only Barry Goldwater but Nelson Rockefeller. Biden is a lifelong Democrat, but it’s easier to imagine him feeling at home in the GOP of Ford’s day than it is to picture Ford cohabiting with Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

Ford is most remembered for his pardon of Nixon, which immediately sent his approval rating from 71% to 49%—“the largest such drop ever recorded,” Smith notes. The decision sparked a storm of condemnation and suspicions of a corrupt deal with the man who appointed Ford to the vice presidency. But Ford thought it was the only way to avert the dismal, protracted spectacle of a criminal trial that would delay a return to political normalcy. He wrote in his memoir, “No other issue could compete with the drama of a former president trying to stay out of jail”—an observation that is being confirmed today. Democrats roasted Ford’s act of clemency, but it looks better in the light of history. In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library awarded him its Profile in Courage Award for the Nixon pardon. 

Ford: Sense Over Sensibility

Resolving that matter allowed Ford to focus on pursuing worthwhile policy changes, with considerable success. Some of them stemmed from such venerable Republican concepts such as anti-communism, fiscal restraint, deregulation and sound money. But, as the book makes abundantly clear, he was not a captive of ideology or ideologues. He also pushed back on his side to embrace worthwhile policies from Democrats, signing the Helsinki Accords, which committed the Soviet bloc nations to human rights that they habitually trampled. Denounced by Reagan and other conservatives as appeasement, the accords soon backfired on the Communist signatories. As historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote, they “gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement,” which demanded that tyrants carry out the promises they had so insincerely made. 

Ford’s longtime House district included Grand Rapids, a bastion of stern Calvinism whose customs forbade swimming and reading newspapers on Sabbath. Over a quarter-century in Congress, he amassed a staunchly conservative voting record and served for eight years as House minority leader. 

But as president, his inner centrist emerged, Norton Smith demonstrates. Ford called for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, signed Title IX that required educational equity for women in universities as a condition of federal funding, and ended U.S. support of white minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He favored a constitutional amendment to leave abortion to the states—an amendment that Sen. Joe Biden voted for—even as First Lady Betty Ford said Roe v. Wade was “the best thing in the world.” He announced a conditional amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers—in a speech before the convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars—and ended the war. When the House rejected funding to evacuate and resettle 70,000 Vietnamese refugees fleeing communism, press secretary Ron Nessen recalled, the angry president exclaimed, “Those sons of bitches”—the only time Nessen had ever heard him swear. But Ford prevailed, eventually admitting 130,000 Vietnamese. The SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union limited nuclear weapons, and its value can be gauged by the fact that Ronald Reagan denounced it as a candidate but, as president, saw the wisdom of adhering to its terms. 

Just as important as policy was Ford’s generous spirit and respect for democratic norms that Nixon had done so much to banish, Norton Smith’s account shows. Ford hosted members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the White House and invited Nixon’s 1972 Democratic opponent, George McGovern, to dinner there, telling him “the house belongs to everyone.” He installed University of Chicago president Edward Levi, a renowned legal scholar, as attorney general, and Levi did much to revive the Justice Department’s reputation for probity—and virtually eliminated warrantless wiretaps, which had been used and abused by Nixon, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. After narrowly losing the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, Ford gracefully accepted defeat and told one friend, “I’ve got to give him the White House in better shape than I found it.” In his inaugural address, Carter thanked him for “all he has done to heal this land.” 

Boring Biden

Biden, being a conventional Democrat, has indulged his share of folly—such as spurring inflation for a while with excessive federal stimulus spending, keeping Trump’s tariffs on China, larding his infrastructure program with “Buy American” requirements and expenditures that have little to do with infrastructure, and overstretching his executive powers to try to erase some $430 billion in student loan debt. He has signaled that he’ll use military force to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion—in contravention of the longstanding U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity that has arguably kept the peace in the region for decades. Not all his policies to deal with migrants at our southwestern border have been humane. He has sacrificed human rights to advance America’s geopolitical concerns, rolling out the red carpet for India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi despite Modi’s party’s alarming record of anti-Muslim and minority persecution.

But Biden’s essential civility still comes through. He has tried to restore previously unquestioned standards of presidential behavior and treat opponents with respect. Operating in a far more polarized political climate, he has less room to pursue bipartisanship. He has called out MAGA types while stressing that they don't speak for all Republicans and tried to ease partisan rancor. Unlike Ford, he cannot pardon Trump given that Trump’s behavior is far more egregious and he is insisting on making another bid for the presidency instead of sailing into the sunset. But Biden is letting the legal process play out and has studiously refrained from weighing into the multiple indictments against Trump— while also ordering the rest of his administration to follow suit. You won’t hear Biden leading chants of “lock him up” at his rallies.

 Like Ford, he is more adept at forging practical compromises than stirring voters with a grand vision. Try as you might, but, just like Ford, you cannot turn him into a cult figure. Many in his party feel decidedly lukewarm about him and his incrementalist approach. 

Yet he’s registered some valuable accomplishments: getting out of Afghanistan, recognizing the need to address climate change, providing critical aid to Ukraine without provoking war with Russia, protecting undocumented immigrants brought here as children, and restoring the basic independence of the Justice Department. He has not opposed the Federal Reserve’s efforts to cool inflation, despite the risk of recession. He scrapped Trump’s ban on transgender members of the military and issued pardons for everyone with federal convictions for marijuana possession, while banning chokeholds and curbing no-knock raids by federal law enforcement personnel. 

More Democat Than Democrat

Although some conservatives believe that he has been captured by leftist progressives in the party, in truth he has declined to let his party’s left wing push him beyond his comfort zone—or the public’s. He has ignored demands to expand the Supreme Court so he could appoint liberal justices. He has allowed new oil drilling on federal lands in Alaska. His plan to relieve student loan debt was far less generous than what progressives demanded.

Most important of all, perhaps, is that Biden has done his best to rally Americans to uphold our political institutions and civic culture against the Trumpist onslaught. On the central issue of our time, the preservation of constitutional democracy, Biden has been firmly on the right side. He understands the gravity of the challenge, and he strives to meet it. 

In a prime time speech at Independence Hall last year, he declared: “This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people, we do not deny it.” As one heckler shouted “Fuck Joe Biden” over and over, the president responded: “They’re entitled to be outrageous. This is a democracy.” 

Somewhere, Gerald Ford was smiling. 

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