Is Joe Biden ready for Joe?The vice president isn’t exactly running for president, but Clinton’s email missteps have focused new attention on the possibility that he might.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE 3/26/15
Joe Biden isn’t not running for president.
That’s not a typo: Hillary Clinton is about to kick off her campaign, and the vice president has taken no steps to run, or to figure out a real plan for what happens if he doesn’t. But he’s not out of the race, either.
Biden ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988 and again in 2008, and has said he’ll announce this summer whether he’s going to try again. His family is vacillating, aides say. Close advisers say they are so in the dark about what’s in his head that some think he might blow past that self-imposed summer deadline, or even December, or even later, just letting the question hang.
Early-state Biden loyalists are getting anxious. Staffers are trying to hold them off, while quietly staying in the loop with the Democratic National Committee about possible primary debate schedules. They acknowledge that reworking his travel plans in February to put him in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in the space of a week might have looked a little too eager.
“‘We’d love to see more of you in New Hampshire,’” Steve Shurtleff, the Democratic leader of the New Hampshire House and a state regional chair for Biden’s 2008 campaign, said he told Biden when he came to Concord three weeks ago. “And he just smiled and said, ‘We’ll see.’ So I guess we’ll see.”
Before the Clinton email scandal broke, Biden was telling people privately he wanted to see how her roll-out went, already intrigued that she’d moved up her announcement date. But he hasn’t mentioned the email situation, say people who’ve spoken with him in recent weeks.
Biden barely registers in 2016 polls and even his superfans admit that he couldn’t compete with Clinton on fundraising — a problem intensified by his decision last year not to start a super PAC since that would risk politicizing him to the point of jeopardizing his role as a conduit for members of Congress to President Barack Obama.
That’s part of the issue: he doesn’t want to step back from the job he’s got, even if that means letting go of the dream of a Biden presidency for the sake of promoting the Obama presidency. Fanning the flames and going to early states is part of running for president, but it’s also a good way, he and people around him know, of drumming up a little more attention if he wants to talk up Obama’s economic record and agenda.
If he doesn’t run, Biden’s circle envisions him taking a central role in the campaign that would be unprecedented for a sitting vice president who isn’t running.
“The vice president will definitely be a big player in 2016,” said one person close to Biden. “The question is: In what role? That’s what he’s contemplating.”
Yet to the diehards, the vision persists of 2016 as a Joe Biden election cycle, where the central themes are middle-class populism, a record of making Washington work with Republicans and Democrats, foreign policy experience, and authenticity.
“In someone more calculating, it would seem like this is threading a narrative for 2016,” said one person familiar with Biden. “But it’s not new to him. It’s not like he just came up with that narrative.”
He’s inclined to run, Biden’s kept telling people privately, if he thinks he can really bring something to the race that Clinton isn’t providing.
Many people around him are pretty sure he won’t. The Clinton campaign tends to agree — but if he did, what a problem they fear that would be for them in Iowa.
So they’re trying to give him space, and time.
Meanwhile, Martin O’Malley is going around to early state Biden stalwarts and asking to be their second choice if he doesn’t run. Those include people like Iowa State Rep. Jim Lykam.
Two weeks ago, while the uproar over Clinton’s use of a private email server was at its loudest, Iowa State Sen. Joe Seng tracked down Lykam at a reception in Des Moines. Seng wanted to throw another big “Joe for Joe” fundraiser in Davenport, like one he did in 2007.
“Have you talked to him lately?” Seng asked Lykam.
“I talked to him last summer and I said, ‘Hey, if you’re going to get in, just give me a call, I’ll be with you,’” Lykam recalled. “I don’t know how I could go about contacting him.”
Since the Clinton email story broke, Shurtleff in New Hampshire says he’s been more eager to hear from Biden — and more confused about why he’s still waiting.
“What we’ve seen with Secretary Clinton early on is she took a lot of oxygen out of the room. But I think now people are having second thoughts,” Shurtleff said. “I think Joe Biden would be a logical person for people to consider.”
But even if she turns out to be the wrong candidate, people close to Biden say, he knows that doesn’t mean he’s the right candidate. That’s what he’s signaling to supporters, too.
“It will be his choice, with his family,” said Teri Goodman, an old Iowa friend who was on his 2008 steering committee and got Biden talking a little 2016 when she stopped by his office in Washington last Tuesday.
Goodman didn’t tell him to make up his mind already. But she acknowledged that he’s got to.
“There’s always time, but the time is getting on the skinny side out here in Iowa,” Goodman said.
Biden has lines he uses with supporters who catch up with him on the ground: “We’ll talk,” he says, or “If I had hair like that, I’d be president.” Or even wistfully: “You know, I think I could win Iowa.”
Biden knows many of his friends and supporters are getting impatient, people around him say.
He’s frustrated that he’s not a more regular part of a conversation that takes the possibility of campaigns by O’Malley and Jim Webb seriously. Yet he is reluctant to actively push himself into it — when former South Carolina chairman Dick Harpootlian talked up Biden as an alternative to Clinton earlier this month, it did not go over well with the vice president’s confidants.
While it’s sometimes said that Clinton’s problem has often been that she has too many advisers, some of those very same Biden advisers fret that he has too few. They tend to answer questions about a Biden presidential run with things like, “your guess is as good as mine.”
No one who’s anywhere near Biden had ever heard of William Pierce, a 26-year-old veteran and 2012 Obama campaign volunteer in Chicago who has decided to start his own Draft Biden movement. He started fundraising this week with a goal for the summer of $5 million and 50,000 signatures on a petition they want to present (and is making very slow progress toward both).
“My internal goal is that we can organize so well, we can create such a picturesque version of what would happen if he did get in,” Pierce said.
Pierce has six people chipping in. He’s got an email list that’s grown from 3,000 to 14,000 in the two weeks since he launched the effort.
Even Pierce pegs Biden’s chances of running at 50-50 at best.
“We’re ready. We’re anxious. We want to get something started,” said Sharon Holle, Biden’s 2008 Davenport field director.
“He’s been here. He maintains his contacts,” said Iowa State Sen. Herman Quirmbach, who represents Ames. “If he decides to run, he’ll draw a lot of interest.”
“‘We’ll talk,’” Harpootlian remembers Biden saying when he saw the vice president in South Carolina last month. “It wasn’t dismissive. It was a sort of ‘Hey, we need to talk about this.’”
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/wheres-joe-116409.html#ixzz3VVzQZGOG
