The first television ad was released by the Draft Biden 2016 Super-PAC, asking Joe Biden to run for President in 2016. Meanwhile, Biden's halo is a bit tarnished this morning.
October 7, 2015

Talk about timing! I always found this story a little bit hard to believe. One of my dear friends died of the same kind of brain tumor Beau Biden had, and I know she wasn't exactly thinking about her family's career plans -- she was preparing to die. She was exhausted, and could barely work up enough energy to speak. But whatever.

Joe Biden has been making his 2016 deliberations all about his late son since August.

Aug. 1, to be exact — the day renowned Hillary Clinton-critic Maureen Dowd published a column that marked a turning point in the presidential speculation.

According to multiple sources, it was Biden himself who talked to her, painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau’s face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because "the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.”

One of the details I found hard to swallow. First of all, what, exactly, are Biden values -- working on behalf of banks and credit card companies? Not to mention, Biden described his son as "having lost his vowels" when they had this conversation. Read that alleged quote, and try to convey it without vowels. Yeah, me neither.

It was no coincidence that the preliminary pieces around a prospective campaign started moving right after that column. People read Dowd and started reaching out, those around the vice president would say by way of defensive explanation. He was just answering the phone and listening.

But in truth, Biden had effectively placed an ad in The New York Times, asking them to call.

Before that moment and since, Biden has told the Beau story to others. Sometimes details change — the setting, the exact words. The version he gave Dowd delivered the strongest punch to the gut, making the clearest swipe at Clinton by enshrining the idea of a campaign against her in the words of a son so beloved nationally that his advice is now beyond politics. This campaign wouldn’t be about her or her email controversy, the story suggests, but connected to righteousness on some higher plane.

Biden has portrayed his decision about a 2016 run as purely emotional, a question of whether he and has family have the strength. That’s a big part of it. But it’s not all of it.

By every account of those surrounding Biden, Beau is constantly on his father’s mind. But so are Clinton’s poll numbers — and his own, as the vice president notes in private details, such as the crosstab data that show him drawing more support from Clinton than Bernie Sanders. So is the prospect of what it would mean to run against a candidate who would make history as the first female nominee, and potentially first female president. So is knowing that the filing deadlines are quickly closing in and that he almost certainly has to decide in roughly the next week to make even a seat-of-the-pants campaign possible.

“Calculation sort of sounds crass, but I guess that’s what it is,” said one person who’s recently spoken to Biden about the prospect of running. “The head is further down the road than the heart is.”

And that’s how it’s been for a while.

Biden's people have issued a denial that's not quite a denial. It all looks rather self-serving.

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