Biden advisers insist the address was not an early version of a 2016 stump speech. Biden dots speech with '16 themes

INDIANOLA, Iowa — Run for president? Who? Joe Biden?

The vice president ostensibly played it cool at Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak-fry fundraiser Sunday, mugging for the crowd about how he can’t imagine why everyone would make such a fuss about his trip.


But beneath the gee-whiz act, Biden used the high-profile Iowa event, where he shared a stage with Harkin and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, to lean into the themes that would undergird any potential presidential campaign: his reputation as a middle-class warrior, his penchant for telling it like it is and his close relationship with the president of the United States.

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“I have great respect for everyone with whom I ran in 2007. If you go back and look at those 13 debates, the only two people who never disagreed on any single, solitary subject in those debates were Barack Obama and Joe Biden,” the vice president told the crowd.

It may not have been lost on the audience that Hillary Clinton ran that year as well.

Biden advisers insist the address was not an early version of a 2016 stump speech. More than a few of the lines were familiar fare for Biden, and the Delaware Democrat shrugged off a reporter’s shouted question about 2016. “I’m ready to win some House and Senate seats — now,” Biden replied.

Still, it’s not hard to hear the strains of a message aimed at selling a Biden candidacy on its own merits. Notably, Biden described himself as a bold speaker of truths on gay rights, recasting the conventional version of events that had the vice president blundering into an endorsement of same-sex marriage before the president was ready.

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“A lot of people criticized me for speaking out, not long ago, about gay marriage. I could not remain silent any longer,” Biden said. “It’s the civil rights of our day. It’s the issue of our day.”

No other Democrat who might run in 2016 can claim to have moved the national debate on gay rights in the same way.

Like the other Democrats who spoke, Biden leaned hard into a message about economic opportunity, but in his case it was a message with a hard edge, drawing on familiar stories about his own family’s struggles.

And while he joked that Obama’s telling of the Biden story makes him “sound like a kid who climbed out of the coal mines with a lunch bucket in my hands,” Biden was entirely unsmiling as he told Iowans that he has felt their economic pain.

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“I don’t know how many times I’ve walked the picket line, I don’t know how many times I’ve been with you in your hometowns as factories were being padlocked and jobs were sent overseas,” Biden said.

The measure of the success of the Obama-Biden administration won’t be the gross domestic product or “whether or not the stock market has returned and exceeded its high, which it has,” Biden said, but whether America has a growing middle class.

While every Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 will probably deliver some version of that message, it’s unlikely that any other contender will be as well-practiced as Biden in those themes.

As much as Biden’s speech was a best-case rendering of his record, the larger Harkin event was also a reminder of the challenges Biden might face if he seeks the presidency in his own right a few years down the line.

There was a notable contrast on stage as Biden and Harkin swapped praise for each other’s long, long years in the Senate as the 38-year-old Castro — and his twin brother, Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro — stood almost literally in the wings.

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Julian Castro, whom Harkin hailed as a politician who represents “the future of our party,” offered up a different version of a Biden-style American dream story: He told the story of his family’s arrival in the United States from Mexico and its climb up the economic ladder, in a narrative that may have greater cultural immediacy than Biden’s story about mines and mills and blue-collar hardship in Pennsylvania.

“When we were coming in on the plane, I looked out the window onto Iowa and I saw all of the fields, the green space. And I thought how proud she would have been that she had been picking crops and her grandson would be here where you guys pick a president of the United States,” Castro said.

The two men aren’t now, and are unlikely ever to be, direct competitors. But the generational contrast speaks for itself — as did Castro’s vagueness in imagining for his audience what election night might feel like in 2016:

“I look forward to the moment when Brit Hume on Fox News turns to Bret Baier and says, ‘Bret, we’re calling Iowa’s electoral votes for the next president of the United States — the Democratic nominee for president!”

Many sitting vice presidents in the past could have expected to hear their own name in that space, even three years out from Election Day.

Biden can boast a deeper familiarity with Iowa than almost any presidential contender, except perhaps Clinton. He told reporters that he made his first trip to the state in 1974 to campaign for Democrat John Culver, who won a Senate seat in Iowa that year. Biden later formed deeper relationships here when he sought the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, and it shows.

Strolling around the steak fry, he greeted multiple voters who were clearly familiar faces, often telling them how little they’d changed.

“The bionic man!” Biden greeted one older gentleman. To a woman nearby he exclaimed: “You haven’t changed a bit! There must be something in the water.”

He’s likable, for sure … but is he likable enough for 2016?

“I think he’s down-to-earth, very empathetic to the needs of the poor,” said Geri Maloy of Dubuque. “He’s enthusiastic about what he does and he has a heart of the people.”

She added: “My heart is with Hillary, but I’d vote for him in a heartbeat.”