The Joe Biden who has been reaching out to Democratic operatives and would-be donors for a potential 2016 bid isn’t quite the happy warrior of bygone days.

Mourning the loss of his eldest son Beau, who succumbed to a brain tumor three months ago, and under intense pressure from the presidential hype he’s helped stoke, Biden is more subdued, grayer and grimly on-task than usual — this while occupying political center stage for the first time since the promising opening days of his doomed 1988 campaign.


For all the breathless reporting on Biden’s every move and meeting, he is, at core, a 72-year-old man presented with an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at one of the worst times of his life.

Several people Biden has talked to in the past month say he starts off conversations by conceding that “some days are better than others,” mixing recollections of Beau with logistical questions about mounting a state-by-state challenge to a vulnerable yet still formidable Hillary Clinton.

“He’s just not himself,” says a longtime friend of Biden’s. “He’s sort of all over the place. He’s engaged but not in that childlike, manic way he usually is. He’s taking it all in and soaking up information, but he’s hard to read. And Joe Biden isn’t usually that hard to read.”

That isn’t to say Biden won’t decide to run — he clearly sees Clinton’s struggles with her email scandal as an opportunity, and no politician in recent history has proven to be as resilient in the face of personal tragedy.

To the annoyance of the Clinton campaign, Biden’s allies have strategically leaked his modest, noncommittal doings to the media, which have given otherwise ho-hum confabs with Elizabeth Warren and President Barack Obama’s former counsel Bob Bauer bombshell treatment. (Warren, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction, offered her usual warning against bringing more Wall Street executives into the White House; the talk with Bauer, an old Biden friend who worked with him closely in the White House, was intended to be an informal, personal check-in session that was leaked against the wishes of the participants.)

But reports that the vice president has all but made up his mind to run are simply not true, according to a half-dozen people in his inner circle interviewed by POLITICO. “He’s not leaning one way or the other,” says one former aide who remains part of the extended Biden political family.

What he has done is accelerated the pace of his deliberations, making personal overtures to Democratic donors — though Clinton’s team has yet to suffer any significant defections. So far he’s attracted a handful of former Obama supporters who have gravitated to a “Draft Biden” startup, including veteran Florida operative Steve Schale and Jon Cooper, a Long Island businessman who was one of Obama’s top New York fundraisers.

But he’s behaved more like a staffer than a principal — sounding out potential supporters without striding into the race with a distinct message or specific policy challenge to Clinton.

“I don’t know what he’s going to do,” said Jim Kreindler, a 2008 Biden fundraiser who is encouraging the vice president to run. “Everybody knows it’s going to be hard to challenge Hillary for money. … But I think he knows that he needs to be positioned to jump in if she really stumbles.”

As he embarks on a fact-finding project most other candidates completed months ago, Biden’s greatest concern remains his family. He’s especially worried about his wife, Jill, who was hit hard by the death of 46-year-old Beau, who she raised after Biden’s first wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash in 1972.

Beau urged his father to run for years, but Jill is deeply skeptical of another run, according to people close to Biden; she re-upped to teach a full-time load of five English classes at Northern Virginia Community College next semester, as first noted by Bloomberg News, not exactly the action of a woman who planned to hit the campaign trail.

Joe Biden wants to run — he always has. But that doesn’t mean he actually will, and those who have spoken with him say he seems far from making a decision. He’s playing the same wait-and-see game he’s played for the past 18 months, telling potential backers he’ll make a decision as late as early October. Since his 2012 reelection, Biden had opted for inaction over action — he opted not to create a leadership PAC for the 2014 midterms, he balked at forming a presidential super PAC, he didn’t seriously sound out donors until this summer.

On the other hand, his numbers are too good to ignore. Without even being in the race, he consistently polls in double digits — and narrowly bested Clinton in head-to-head matchups against top Republicans in the key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Moreover, he’s regarded as much more trustworthy than the former secretary of state, enjoying a 20-point lead over Clinton in that metric among battleground state voters.

Obama, according to current and former West Wing officials, is more inclined to support Clinton’s candidacy. Despite her woes, he sees her as a more electable candidate and a more effective keeper of his policy legacy. He’s done everything but endorse her already, putting his vast fundraising network in the hands of Clinton’s super PAC allies. Two of Obama’s top White House aides, John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, are running Clinton’s campaign and report regularly to their old West Wing friends — including the president.

But Obama has told people around him to give the vice president “space” to make his decision, and urged his staff not to make Biden feel pressured not to run.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday that the president wouldn’t rule out making an endorsement in the primaries — and other West Wing officials told POLITICO that Obama has privately expressed a preference for Clinton as his successor, while keeping up the pretense of being undecided in public. (“I love ’em both,” Obama said on NBC’s “Today” show in February when asked who he would back.)

Clinton’s camp, hands full with the email controversy and a surprisingly stout challenge from independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, isn’t in a patient mood. Bill Clinton, according to a person who has spoken with the former president in the past couple of weeks, is “very agitated” by the possibility of a Biden candidacy and incensed at the press hype around a possible bid.

Hillary Clinton, Democrats in her orbit tell POLITICO, is less concerned — and several top Clinton campaign officials have told associates they think a Biden bid would energize what has been a fairly lackluster performance by the candidate thus far.

Either way, the Clinton campaign is monitoring Biden’s activities closely — and Biden’s small team is acutely sensitive to slights against him, and to the possibility that her operation — including Correct the Record and other Clinton-friendly outside groups — would push anti-Biden opposition research to reporters in order to dissuade the vice president from running. “They better not do that,” said a Biden confidant. “That would bring really out his Irish.”

People close to Clinton say their boss wouldn’t let them push negative information on Biden even if they wanted to — and it would backfire anyway, considering Biden’s tragic family circumstances.

Biden’s decision will ultimately come down to convincing his family that embarking on one last long-shot campaign is worth the emotional toll, those close to him say. His staff, small as it is, already seems to be on board: Chief of staff Steve Ricchetti, a onetime Clinton aide, has arranged many of Biden’s recent meetings, and longtime staffer Mike Donilon — who was close to Beau — has been the most enthusiastic proponent of a 2016 bid, according to Democrats with knowledge of the situation.

Hunter Biden, the vice president’s surviving son, is said to be generally supportive of his father’s wishes, whatever they might be, but not a cheerleader — Biden’s sister Val, long his closest political adviser, is equally ambivalent. Jill Biden will be a hard sell.

Many of Joe Biden’s friends and family — people who deeply love the man, even if they don’t share his unquenchable presidential ambitions — quietly hoped the vice president would never be forced to decide whether or not to run in 2016.

Beau Biden had been expected to survive into the fall, according to several people in the vice president’s orbit. Friends who wanted Biden to bow out gracefully prayed the ailing son would rally — and hoped his devoted father would be so focused on his recovery he wouldn’t have time to contemplate a campaign until it was too late.

But as has happened so often in Biden’s four decades in the public eye, fate intervened, cruelly.

Experimental treatments to slow the cancer failed, and the former National Guard major and Iraq War veteran — so upright he refused to wear his uniform in political ads — faded quickly. That left his grieving father, who could use Beau’s steadfast support now more than ever, alone to confront one of the most wrenching political decisions of his life.

“We do not know how long we’ve got here. We don’t know when fate will intervene,” Obama said at Beau Biden’s funeral — words that seem to apply to father as well as son. “We cannot discern God’s plan. What we do know is that with every minute that we’ve got, we can live our lives in a way that takes nothing for granted.”

Annie Karni contributed to this report.