Six months ago the idea that Joe Biden would run for president — let alone have a shot at winning — was almost fanciful. This time round Hillary Clinton really had it sewn up, while Vice-President Biden suffered from life-long foot-in-mouth disease. That first bit is out of date. Clinton’s campaign is in trouble. The second has been turned on its head. Donald Trump’s surge puts Biden’s verbal waywardness in a different light. Nowadays voters treat gaffes — even coarseness — as a virtue. Any whiff of focus groups is anathema. In such a climate Biden’s folksy sincerity offers an enticing contrast to a bunkered Clinton. He is the Democratic party’s best insurance to a Clinton implosion.
The problem is that he cannot make up his mind. To be fair, Hamlet-like paralysis may be the only sane response to today’s demagogic spirit. On the 2016 trail, conventional wisdom has been shredded more times than political consultants care to remember. No one retains much predictive credibility. Much like economists, pundits happily rationalise backwards but have lost faith in their grasp of the future. The personal side is also fraught. It is less than three months since Beau Biden, the vice-president’s son and political heir, died tragically of brain cancer. Presidential bids often take a greater toll on families than on the candidates themselves. There is also the gender issue. Would Biden really want to get in the way of America’s first female president?
And yet. There is another movie running through Biden’s head and those of a growing numbers of senior Democrats. They have watched in disbelief as Bernie Sanders, a socialist maverick, has generated all the passion in the Democratic race. In three months Clinton’s support has plunged among Democrats nationwide as well as in the critical early states of New Hampshire and Iowa. With just four months to go, Sanders now leads in both. Even Biden is polling at more than 20 per cent — roughly half Clinton’s level — without having entered his name. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as the Labour party leader in the UK has fuelled the sense of unease. Here too was a quixotic leftie with no chance of winning. Yet Corbyn romped home by a mile.
Might Sanders actually defeat Clinton? No one would any longer rule it out. Sanders would have as slim a chance of making it to the White House as Corbyn has of entering Downing Street. A less improbable ending to that Democratic nightmare is that Clinton wins the nomination but is so wounded that she would lose the general. Either way, Biden is the obvious back-up — indeed, he is the only viable one. No one is more aware of that than he. Close friends say he could go either way. The difference with Clinton is that he is happy to share his inner turmoil with the US public. People warm to his emotional openness. “When we see you, we think we’re actually seeing the real Joe Biden,” chat show host Stephen Colbert told him last week. “You’re not some sort of politician who has created some sort of facade.”
A Biden candidacy could pose a real threat to Clinton. His likeability and trustworthiness ratings are in a different league to hers. He would also be uniquely placed to exploit her use of a “home brew” internet server while she was secretary of state. “We both participated in the same meetings in the Situation Room and the Oval Office,” he could say. “I would never have dreamt of walking out of those meetings and emailing details on an unsecure account about matters of the highest national security. What were you thinking Hillary?”
It would be uncharacteristic of Biden to play it that dirty. But he has a loaded gun and if he enters the fray he would be in it to win. Logic would lead him there.
A Biden candidacy could also do Clinton a lot of good. If Biden is this cycle’s Hamlet, Clinton is the ghost of his dead father. Every time her campaign briefs on its focus group findings — mostly recently that she should apologise for using a private account (advice that she took) — we are reminded of her downsides. Clinton’s 2016 failings are remarkably similar to what sunk her in 2008. Then, as now, she began in a defensive crouch as the prohibitive favourite. Her caution was her undoing.
What many forget was how impressively she campaigned after it became clear that she had lost to Barack Obama. Suddenly, she was free to be herself and won state after state in an impassioned late burst. By putting her back to the wall, a Biden declaration might remind people of Clinton’s upsides. Americans like a fighter. They also like competition.
Then there is the Trump factor. His rise is the most confounding upset in recent US political history — only he, in his boundless self-belief, claims to have foreseen it. Hopefully, pollsters are as wrong in expecting his surge to persist as they were in failing to anticipate it. By contrast, it is possible to imagine a Biden campaign — and even a Biden administration. Who knows what would happen in practice? All that can safely be said is that his candidacy would be healthy for US democracy.
