While Paul Ryan is at least tentatively running for a job he never wanted, Joe Biden is not running for the job he has likely wanted since at least the Nixon administration.
It’s hard to fault the vice president for his decision. He and his family are still clearly hurting from the death of his son Beau in May. It reportedly took a while to get his wife to give the thumbs-up for a 2016 campaign. And if he still had to ask whether his heart was in the right place for a presidential bid as late as this summer, no was probably the right answer.
Running for president is hard enough as it is. It is nearly impossible if everyone involved isn’t all in.
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But Biden has to be considered the biggest tease in American politics. For two days in a row, he previewed some not-too-subtle contrasts with Hillary Clinton. Without mentioning her by name, he portrayed himself as more likable and capable of gaining consensus in Washington.
Biden said he didn’t view Republicans as enemies, a line that could only be interpreted as a shot at Hillary’s debate assertion that members of the opposition party were her proudest enemies, just yesterday. After the first paragraph, Biden’s withdrawal speech sounded an awful lot like a previously prepared campaign speech.
The window for a Biden run this late was always going to be narrow, given Clinton’s huge head start in fundraising, organization and attracting popular support. What kept it from shutting entirely was the controversy over her private email server as secretary of state reinforcing public concerns about her trustworthiness, which keeps showing up in polls in ways that has disturbed even some partisan Democrats.
There was at least some fear that this would hurt Clinton in a general election. And what if the other shoe drops concerning classified information sent and received on the homebrew server? Biden, whose positives contrast nicely with Clinton’s negatives, seemed liked a solid — maybe the only — Plan B.
This seems to have been Biden’s own logic, as his decision was timed between the first Democratic debate and Clinton’s testimony before the Benghazi committee, both opportunities for these concerns to be further amplified.
But Clinton easily brushed off criticisms of her emails in that Democratic debate, which she dominated almost as thoroughly as Carly Fiorina ruled the first Republican undercard. Moreover, Bernie Sanders, her main challenger and a candidate who has fairly consistently outpolled Biden up to this point, declared email attacks partisan, irrelevant and almost illegitimate, giving the front-runner a big assist.
Worse, House Majority Kevin McCarthy appeared to endorse the idea that the Benghazi panel’s main goal was driving down Hillary’s poll numbers. He walked it back, but the damage was done. The Clintons have always thrived by making any inquiries into their ethics look like opportunistic machinations of the vast right-wing conspiracy. And nervous Democrats can remind themselves that the Clintons have been beating this overreaching right-wing conspiracy for over twenty years.
If Biden had made a decision earlier, maybe none of this would matter. But a large part of the rationale for him getting in this late was that Hillary is damaged goods. Damaged she may be, but her campaign doesn’t look ready for a return to sender.
McCarthy’s remarks were the final straw that knocked him out of contention for House speaker. (The California Republican himself described them as not helpful.) Maybe they were the final straw for Biden too.
