Christopher Baus writes about his problems linking libstdc++ statically. Yes, making C++ binaries that will work properly in different Linux distributions is somewhat painful. The problem is not so much linking libstdc++ statically – it is just a library, after all – but the runtime support required by C++ code in general, to enable features like RTTI and exception handling.
The runtime support code used by different parts of a C++ application needs to be compatible. If one part of the program needs to dynamic_cast or catch objects provided by another, both parts must agree on certain implementation details: how to find vtables, how to unwind the stack, and so on.
For C++ and a few other GCC-supported languages with similar features, such details are specified by a C++ ABI. Whenever the ABI used by GCC changes you'll end up with incompatible libraries produced by the different GCC versions. The same is true for plain C, but the C ABI is much simpler and has been around a