Vice-President Joe Biden is running for President in 2016.
That is, he’s thinking about it seriously. That is, he’s not going to let Hillary Clinton, her fearsome political machine, or Jim Messina, his boss’s former campaign manager, make his decision for him. That is, he considers himself more than a match for Hillary, but he’s not oblivious to the polls showing her way, way ahead of him. That is, what the heck, he’s seventy-one, he’s still full of energy, he’s served President Obama loyally, he loves the game, and he thinks—pundits and pollsters be damned—that this might be the moment for an old-school, shit-kicking, hand-grasping, mouth-running, stick-up-for-the-working-stiff pol like himself.
“It’s either going to be me or someone else who is going to make this argument in the Democratic Party,” he told Glenn Thrush, the author of a bang-up new profile at Politico. “When productivity increased, when profit increased, the people who are the reason for the increase were to share in the bounty. That’s what was settled in the late ’30s on collective bargaining, the Fair Labor Standards Act. … Guess what? The workers are getting screwed.”
Surely, they are. But that wasn’t all we’ve heard from the Vice-President in recent days. “It’s as likely I run as I don’t run,” he said on “The View,” the ABC talk show. “Well, you know, I was planning on making a major announcement tonight, but I decided tonight’s your night,” he joked to Seth Meyers, the new host of NBC’s “Late Night.”
In some precincts of Washington, Chicago, and, perhaps, Chappaqua, this public speculation about entering the 2016 race will be written off as Biden being Biden: romantic, unrealistic, undisciplined. Once he sits down and thinks it over seriously—he says he won’t make a decision until after the midterms—he’ll accept reality. Evidently, that’s what many of his friends reckon, too. Of the dozen people close to Biden interviewed by Thrush for his piece, not one thinks he will enter the race. “Then again,” Thrush writes, “every single one also said it wouldn’t be a surprise if he jumped in at the last minute …”
The timing of Biden’s mini-media blitz is hardly random. Since the start of the year, there has been a concerted effort to make Clinton look like an unstoppable candidate—the one with the popular support, the campaign firepower, and the money. Last month, Messina, who managed Obama’s reëlection campaign, told the Times that Priorities USA, the Democratic Super PAC that spent more than sixty-five million dollars in 2012, would be backing Clinton in 2016. “I think the numbers clearly show that she’s the strongest Presidential candidate on the Democratic side,” Messina said. “And Priorities is going to be there for her if she decides to run.”
Biden was infuriated by Messina’s endorsement of Clinton. Last summer, Thrush writes, “Messina had assured Biden—during a meeting in the vice president’s West Wing office—that the PAC was likely to remain neutral, partly out of deference to Biden.” According to Thrush’s sources, Biden was so angry that he refused to speak with Messina when the latter tried to explain that he had only meant to say that Clinton was the strong front-runner. (Looking at Messina’s quote, it’s hard to see any ambiguity.) Rather than buckling to what almost everyone else in the political-media establishment sees as the inevitable—Clinton’s accession to the 2016 nomination—he’s out there giving interviews, charming Barbara Walters, and joshing with Seth Meyers.
And why not? With Clinton riding so high, the expectations for a Biden candidacy would be low, which means that he wouldn’t have much to lose. And his poll numbers aren’t too awful. According to a new Times poll, forty-one per cent of Democrats want him to enter the race, against thirty-one per cent who don’t. That leaves him far behind Clinton—more than eight in ten Democrats said that they want her run—but well ahead of other possible candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, and Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland.
Biden is surely right when he says that there is an opportunity for someone to run to the left of Clinton, as an economic populist. If Warren stays out, as she’s indicated that she will, the veep could fill the gap. At this stage, the only other possibilities appear to be O’Malley, who recently acknowledged that he’s “looking at” a possible bid; Brian Schweitzer, the former governor of Montana, who has just joined MSNBC as a talking head; and Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, who, presumably, would run as an independent rather than as a Democrat.
A Biden candidacy would be a long shot, of course. He’s run twice before, and both times it ended badly. In 1988, he was forced to withdraw amid allegations that he’d plagiarized a speech by Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader in Britain, and misstated, or exaggerated, his college record. In 2008, he made little impact in a contest dominated by Obama and Clinton, and dropped out after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucus. But, if he were to run in 2016, being the underdog would be part of his appeal. At the very least, his candidacy could serve a useful purpose by forcing Clinton to engage with tricky issues relating to inequality, wage stagnation, and the party’s ties to Wall Street, and by showing that nobody, not even a former Secretary of State, senator, and First Lady who would be bidding to become the first female President, can expect to have a nomination handed to her.
According to Thrush, Biden met with his family and closest advisers over Christmas to talk about a strategy for the next two years. And his longtime aide, Ron Klain, has composed a memo on two “paths for positioning Biden in the 2016 race: either as a progressive alternative to Clinton or as an heir apparent, ready to pounce if she decides not to run.” Thrush writes that Biden “told me he was ‘as qualified as anybody’ to be president, and, more pointedly, he has been telling friends he thinks he’s ‘the most qualified,’ a clear reference to Clinton.”
Maybe, just maybe, the long march to 2016 could be more interesting than most of us expected.
Photograph by Jason Reed/Reuters.
