By the time you read this, it is possible that Vice President Joe Biden will have announced his candidacy for the presidency. Or not.

It has been two-and-a-half long months since Biden told the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd the story of his son Beau’s deathbed plea to run—“The White House should not revert to the Clintons,” he told his father in Dowd’s version, “and … the country would be better off with Biden values”—but the vice president has yet to make up his mind.