22 October 2015 - Joe Biden won't be running for President

Joe Biden's 80 Days of Indecision
Alexandra Jaffe (NBC News)
For more than 80 days, Vice President Joe Biden kept America guessing about his next steps.
But in the end, even with 80 days of indecision, Biden's aides and allies echoed the vice president, acknowledging, as he did on Wednesday, "we're out of time."
One South Carolina operative with Draft Biden, the group setting up the pre-campaign early-state infrastructure for Biden in case of a run, noted the sheer size of Hillary Clinton's operation would be tough to challenge.
"A concern that we had at this point in the game was that we were coming in so late against such a massive machine [for frontrunner Hillary Clinton] that we may not have the time to build what we need to build," the operative said.
The operative was certain, though, with a few more weeks, things would've been different: "If he had gotten in the race over the summer, I can almost guarantee you that he would've swept the South and made this into a two-person primary."
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Joe Biden's Too Long Goodbye
Howard Fineman (The Huffington Post)
Joe Biden is a man of many minds, often in conflict. But he wasn’t serious about running for president.

Most of his inner circle wasn't serious about the idea, either.

Biden said in February that he would decide by the end of the summer whether he would run in 2016. At that time, no one thought much of it -- other than that he was a vice president understandably reluctant to fold his cards.

After his son Beau’s death in May, Biden emphatically didn’t have the heart to run, and he privately said so to those who had known him longest. And they believed him.

They knew what an emotional mess he was after the loss of his son. They knew that he didn’t have it in him to launch what would have been a ferocious contest for the nomination.

But even so -- and at the sufferance of a sympathetic political clan -- Biden World staged (or allowed) a farewell tour, which finally came to an end on Wednesday, that risked making a dignified mourner look like a manipulator in search of a last road to glory.
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What We Should Have Said if Joe Biden Had Run
Nate Cohn (The New York Times)
There might not have been an opening for Vice President Joe Biden in the spring, but he apparently sees one now. Since then, just about every longer-term political development has gone his way — so much so that he decided on INSERT DAY OF THE WEEK to start a presidential bid with less than four months until the Iowa caucuses.

Yet he enters the race behind both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders in almost every respect. He trails in the polls and in support from party leaders. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders have had a huge head start in fund-raising and building a campaign organization.
Mr. Biden’s decision is a gamble that the favorable political trends that have tempted him into the race will continue and ultimately overwhelm Mrs. Clinton’s underlying advantages.
It’s not impossible, but it is a long shot.
Mrs. Clinton will not easily collapse, as she reminded us in the last debate, but the Biden boomlet might. Late-breaking candidates like Mr. Biden are prone to falter once they enter the fray. Their standing at the start of the race is often more reflective of a favorable political tide than their true appeal.
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