Vice President Joe Biden, left, talks with Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., his longtime confidant and aide, in the U.S. Capitol in 2010. (Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call via Getty Images)
Vice President Joe Biden is expected to reveal in the coming weeks whether he’ll make a third bid for the presidency, closing out the last big, open question about the makeup of the 2016 presidential field and ending what has become the speculative political parlor game of the summer.
As people try to understand what Biden might be thinking, it’s worth taking a look at how he approached his previous bids for presidency in 1988 (when he pulled out of the race amid a plagiarism controversy before voting began) and 2008 (when he dropped out after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucuses).
One of the most instructive texts on this front is an oral history conducted by the U.S. Senate’s historian in 2011 with Biden’s longtime confidant and top aide, former U.S. Sen. Ted Kaufman. Kaufman spent decades as Biden’s chief of staff, then briefly filled his boss’s Delaware Senate seat in 2009 when Biden left for the White House.
Kaufman’s extensive and multipart talk with Don Ritchie, now historian emeritus of the Senate, covered several key topics about Biden’s political life, including an entire interview titled “Biden for President.”
While some things have obviously changed since Biden’s earlier races for the White House — age, experience, the emergence and evolution of the Internet — other important things have remained constant: Biden’s tight inner circle, his family-first nature and his pragmatic approach to politics. With that in mind, Yahoo News culled the lengthy on-the-record interview with Kaufman, who declined to comment beyond his previous accounts, to find nuggets that might reveal a little bit about how the vice president has previously weighed presidential decisions and is approaching the last big political choice of his elected career.
For Biden, family set the terms for how and when to enter the presidential race:
“Basically after the ’84 election we started preparing for a presidential election. Essentially what was done was there was a decision made. The first decision always was personal and family with Joe Biden, and by the way I think it’s underrated in terms of all politicians, there’s a number of misperceptions out there with the public, just like I’m sure it is in trying to understand baseball players or understand academics, but when you’re inside you realize that what drives most politicians’ decision is personal. How does it affect my family? If my family’s not going to be onboard for this campaign, I’m not running. … It’s a practical and a personal problem. You will probably fail, if you run without having your family squared away — we can go back through history and look at people who had done that, or tried to do that. So the first decision was: was the family ready to do this.”
Biden thought years of advance planning made for a better White House bid:
“I think we knew better than most people what was required. We knew that for this incredibly complex enterprise, getting started early was essential. You could run at the end, like Gore ran at the end in ’88 and did very well, so you don’t have to but it really was better to do it over the long pull. So we started in ’84 in terms of national scheduling.”
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