On Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden finally made official what his camp had been teasing for months: He’s running for president, for the third time. While former President Obama has made clear that he believes Biden is a good candidate, he refuses to give an official endorsement, something Biden claims he actually requested. “The vice president actually asked the president not to endorse,” Biden’s spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield told the press last week. “He wants to make his own case. He is running on an incredibly strong message of wanting to restore the soul of the nation.”
At the beginning of the 2016 election cycle, Biden likewise publicly pondered a presidential run, but after weeks of agonizing over the decision, the vice president chose to let Hillary Clinton have her ultimately very disappointing day. Amid the buzz about Biden’s big announcement, and with Obama unwilling to fully throw his weight behind him, The New York Times revealed some more details about what went on behind the scenes in 2015, particularly Obama’s efforts to convince Biden not to run.
“Barack Obama did not think Joseph R. Biden Jr. should run for president — he hardly needed to say it out loud for aides to understand that,” Peter Baker wrote in a piece published by the Times Sunday. “The trick that summer of 2015 was finding a way to nudge Mr. Biden to stay out of the race without looking as if he was nudging Mr. Biden to stay out of the race.”
Why did Obama want Biden to stay on the sidelines? He “had long since concluded that Hillary Clinton had the best chance of winning in 2016.” Additionally, Obama felt that the tragic death of Biden’s son was too great a grief for him to carry while running a grueling presidential campaign.
Obama’s dilemma, Baker writes, was trying to convince Biden to stay out without the vice president feeling that his hand was being forced. He handled it by giving Biden strong hints about his desire for him not to run over a matter of weeks. “Over the course of weekly lunches, he gently pressed Mr. Biden on his thinking,” Baker writes. “Eventually, the president arranged for his own strategist to deliver a daunting assessment of the odds against a race. Mr. Biden got the message.”
Baker notes that Biden eventually acknowledged that Obama “was not encouraging” about him running against Clinton, whom Obama had defeated in the primary back in 2008.
Baker goes on to provide a summary of how Obama and Biden’s relationship developed over the years, including the tension caused by Biden’s infamous, condescending and racially charged comment about Obama during the 2008 election cycle: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
This is Biden’s third run for the presidency. His first two attempts, first in 1988 then in 2008, ended in rather embarrassing fashion — the first derailed by a plagiarism scandal and the second by a failure to get even close to competing with Clinton and Obama in 2008 primaries. When asked by Obama to be his running mate, Biden was reportedly hesitant, but eventually decided to accept.
Related: Biden: I Told Obama Not To Endorse Me. Internet: Sure, Joe.