Come Home, Joe.

I was in line to pick up my lunch order in Philadelphia at around noon. I looked up to the TV in the shop, tuned always and thankfully to MSNBC, and I see a live shot of an empty podium in the White House Rose Garden. The red Breaking News chyron at the bottom of the screen informs me that we are awaiting a “statement” from the Vice President. Brian Williams and Andrea Mitchell are breathlessly speculating that if this is a Presidential campaign announcement, the expected presence of the President along side the Vice President during his announcement would be a massive rebuke to Hillary Clinton. I suppose it never crossed their mind that no Vice President in their right mind would announce a campaign from the Rose Garden, and no President would allow him to do it while there was an active campaign in his party. But you would announce you are not running. So I immediately assumed, correctly, that the Vice President was going to announce he was not running, while our wonderful liberal media continued to engage in their favorite game for a few more minutes.

It was the same game we have all engaged in for months if not years. The speculation over whether Joe Biden would mount a third campaign for President.

He was never going to.

There are certain political realities. If you are going to run for President as an incumbent Vice President, you begin planning it the day after you are reelected as Vice President. If Biden was ever serious about running, he would have began freezing the field in late November 2012. Perhaps he could have even convinced Hillary not to run. Unlikely, but the invisible primary is real and it matters, and if Biden did want to run, he had to begin the work back then, if only to inform donors and the party establishment that there would be a real contest between himself and Hillary in 2015-16.

He did not do that.

He allowed Hillary to occupy the field. To vacuum up all the donors, all the endorsements, all the talent. Sure, there were occasional pronouncements from the Vice President’s office that the VP has not made any decision about whether he would run, yadda yadda yadda, yeah he may actually run yadda yadda yadda. The political class and the establishment took that kind of talk for exactly what is: an effort to preserve the VP’s political capital so that he still had cache and leverage in the “town.”

The Vice President said today that he just ran out of time. Bullshit. He had plenty of time. From late November 2012 until this spring, he had plenty of time to make his decision, and he made it. Long ago.

No, what we saw today, and the media attention and political moves over the last few months, were all a charade. A combination of the VP maintaining his capital, coupled with Biden’s circle of donors, operatives, strategists and staff hoping for a campaign so that they could have future jobs, further coupled some establishment panic at Hillary’s bad summer of polling and news, all contributed to the speculation over a possible third Biden presidential campaign.

What we saw today was a bow, finally, to the reality that Hillary Clinton is the chosen successor to President Obama. And she has been since 2012, if not 2008. But the extent of the Vice President’s speech, which was good, was also a statement of what he will be going forward: the Plan B. Should Clinton die or falter, he will be there, and his speech today told us that.

But, what is more likely, is that our Joe Biden will eventually return home to Delaware for retirement.

And frankly, I am relieved.

I like Joe Biden. Personally and politically. Yes, there are some areas where I have disagreed with him, but that is true with anyone. If he were actually to run, I would have dreaded that campaign against Hillary Clinton. Because I like her too, personally and politically. So the race would have been like watching two family members or two close friends fight with you in the middle. And I felt that Joe Biden would have still lost and be lesser for it, his image and favorability tarnished, all the while still suffering and grieving from the loss of his son not four months ago.

So come home, Joe.

There is life after politics. After the White House.