“That man’s in trouble, politically in trouble,” Joe Biden said of then-President Jimmy Carter in July 1979, according to an account at the time in the Wilmington Evening Journal. Biden had held off on publicly backing Carter because he wanted to endorse a candidate who would ensure Democrats retained the White House in the 1980 election. “I’m not certain that’s Jimmy Carter right now,” he told the paper.

Biden was in a position to know. He held a leadership post in Carter’s successful 1976 presidential bid after becoming the first sitting U.S. senator to endorse him. Biden eventually backed Carter’s failed 1980 re-election bid, and the bond they formed early in Biden’s career lasted through a large part of their lives.

Now Biden is himself in the White House and stumbling in some of the same ways as Carter as he sets out to win a second term. Both men struggled to sell legislative victories and retain the party’s core voters as high inflation and foreign-policy disasters eroded their support. And both men had a disconnect with voters that’s leaving Democrats afraid that Biden could share Carter’s political fate of being a one-term president.

[It’s not for nothing that we’ve often used the Biden-Carter photo of that era, especially when it comes to inflation. Now Biden also has a hostage crisis in the Middle East, with American citizens still held by Hamas, as well as an energy policy that will enforce ‘malaise’ on Americans in the future. Welcome Back, Carter, indeed. — Ed]