Vice President Joseph Biden’s team “is putting out the word that he is leaning in favor of joining the presidential race next month,” the Washington Times reports.
Said Democratic bundler Jon Cooper: “They have given increasingly strong signals that Biden is going to throw his hat in the ring. I’m as confident as I can be that he will be entering the race.”
There have been several pieces like that, in other publications, quoting one Democratic fundraiser or one staff member. And the sense I get when I read that is that, far from being a planned leak from the Biden camp or from the Vice President himself, it is an effort to nudge the Vice President into the race. Edward Issac-Dovere and Gabriel Debendetti at Politico agree:
Joe Biden’s trial balloon is being inflated without him.
Seriously, people who claim to be insiders say, he’s going to run. Probably going to run. Definitely thinking about running. They think. Or they want to think. It’s not that Biden’s done anything different since the last round of will he/won’t he stories.
It’s not that he’s put together a campaign staff or made any of the most preliminary of moves to show he’s interested in a 2016 White House run.
But even as the vice president has focused on healing himself and his family after the death of his son Beau last month, there’s a group of people who can’t stop talking to him about his prospects, encouraging him to run. And they can’t stop talking to reporters about what they’ve said and what they think they’ve heard back, either.
Look, if a sitting Vice President wanted to run for President, he of course wants to run as the incumbent President’s third term and natural successor, since obviously the President chose the Vice President to be his partner for the last eight years. It was what the elder Bush did. It was what Al Gore should have done (and if he did he would have won). But Vice President Biden has allowed Hillary Clinton to fill that role. Hillary Clinton is running as President Obama’s third term and natural successor. The role of the scrappy insurgent / challenger has already been filled twice over by Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. The role of the no-hope-vanity-project single issue candidate have been filled twice over by Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb, though we don’t know what specific issue they will be running on. So where is there room for Vice President Biden? Where is his constituency?
The answer is to be a Plan B should Hillary Clinton die or be unable to run. That’s his role. And my sense is running for President is the last thing on the Vice President’s mind right now, for obvious reasons.
But is not enough for the Biden backers who are so often quoted in stories like these on Biden’s potential candidacy. Ed Kilgore says that the untimely death of Beau Biden has now become a talking point for Biden backers.
While these folks clearly don’t need much oxygen to keep this hope alive, they are having to deal with the unseemly nature of such talk when the object of their ambitions and his family are still mourning the untimely death of Beau Biden. The most outspoken Biden booster, the South Carolina Democratic warhorse Dick Harpootlian, has gotten pretty close to the edge by working that tragedy into his talking points:
“That the VP was back in D.C. yesterday standing next to the president was a good sign for those of us that want him to do this,” said Dick Harpootlian, the former South Carolina Democratic chairman who’s always eager to boost Biden’s prospects — and told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week that Beau Biden had wanted his dad to run.
Harpootlian is always the go-to guy for a quote on whether Joe Biden is going to run, as evidenced by the News Journal front page story last Sunday. This man is a true believer, but he needs to cool his jets. He is a professional politico, and he should realize the dynamics that I have laid out above: the only room for Biden is if Clinton bows out. Given that, he should shut the fuck up about what Beau Biden wanted. That’s just … unseemly is the word but it doesn’t convey how garish it is. The narrative of personal tragedy with respect to Joe and the late Beau Biden writes itself, and will be there waiting for Biden if he is the Plan B down the road, all without Dick Harpootlian forcing it down our throats.