Vice President Joe Biden spent the last week wonderingly publicly what might have been if he had decided to run for president, going so far as to say he’d have been the best candidate for the job.
But Democrats don’t think Biden is trying to undercut the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
“In my view this is legacy-burnishing on his part,” Nelson Cunningham, a former top lawyer in the Bill Clinton White House, told the Washington Examiner when asked why Biden feels the need to speak out now. “He wants to ensure that history does not record that he bowed out of the race because he did not believe he would beat Hillary in the primary. ”
Biden raised eyebrows during a interview with “Good Morning America” on Wednesday, when he appeared to take a potshot at Clinton’s looming nomination. “I planned on running,” Biden said. “I think I would have been the best president, but it was the right thing, not just for my family, for me.”
“It’s kind of like poking the bear,” former Draft Biden Executive Director William Pierce told the Examiner, when asked why Biden feels the need to speak out now. “It’s just him explaining what coulda-shoulda happened.”
When Biden ultimately decided not to run for office in October, he cited both the death of his son Beau and the Clinton campaign’s growing infrastructure as two factors preventing him from entering the race. Now, over six months later, the vice president said that while he will support Clinton in the general election and trusts she will win the presidency, he still believes he would have been a better president and that Elizabeth Warren would have made a strong running mate.
Still, a source close to the vice president insists that between now and November, his focus will be on helping Democrats get elected to the Senate and on working to fund cancer research.
Biden sought the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008. Neither he nor his most ardent supporters have ever completely given up hope, but they know it would have taken something major, like Clinton’s email scandal putting her in real legal trouble.
The PAC that laid the groundwork for him, Draft Biden 2016, went dormant after Biden decided not to run in October 2015, and former staffers insist the group remains that way. But one former Draft Biden member said that while he knew the “ship had sailed” on Biden’s candidacy, “it just kills me” that Biden didn’t run because he “would be in the lead by now.”
“If Clinton implodes by the convention, which is highly unlikely but theoretically possible, then maybe the party would turn to Joe Biden to unite the party,” one Draft Biden member stated. “If she is indicted even on one charge, that would turn everything upside down. Joe Biden could really unite the party.”
No matter what, don’t expect Biden to stop offering his opinions on the race, even when they might not be helpful to Clinton.
“The vice president is just being himself.” the Draft Biden supporter said. “When he speaks, it’s almost never scripted.”
