The burning Washington question of will-he-or-won’t-he was finally answered on Wednesday when Joe Biden said, no, he’s not running against Hillary Clinton for President.

In some inner media circles it was quickly replaced by another question — how did we fall into this trap again?


In the tense days leading up to Biden’s Rose Garden statement, media reports were heavy with mostly anonymous insider accounts of Biden’s process suggesting he was “leaning” toward yes—including some reports here at POLITICO (notably in this report from Mike Allen—though POLITICO also featured lots of skeptical voices on Biden’s deliberations). Some reports went as far as to speculate not on the if, but the when, why and how.

Fox News’ Ed Henry took to Twitter as recently as Monday night with this: "Three sources close to [Biden] telling me he's expected to announce he is running but the sources are all urging caution on 48-hr timeline.” And: “The three sources say [Biden] telling supporters in calls planning to jump in race but not rushing — watch [Saturday’s] Jefferson Jackson dinner Iowa."

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol seemed to be refracting the same news when he tweeted: “I'm told by Democrat I trust that Biden ‘almost certain’ to run, will announce this week in time to speak at the Iowa [Jefferson-Jackson] dinner Saturday night."

Reporters everywhere earlier this week prepared for either answer, drafting both “yes he will” and “no he won’t” stories. A technical glitch caused the Washington Post to publish an article titled “Joe Biden to launch presidential campaign” on Monday night; noting this, The New York Times Upshot Blog went ahead and published its prepared “yes” story under the headline “What We Would Have Said if Joe Biden Had Run.”

It was a compressed version of how the story had played out over the summer, with an almost head-spinning number of articles reporting on every trip, conversation, strategy meeting, or facial expression that Biden made, looking for signs of a decision.

After Biden made his decision clear, the soul-searching started almost immediately in newsrooms. But the immediate answer — that Biden decided it was too late to mount a run — wasn’t satisfying, even if it might well be true.

This is familiar territory for Biden — and the media who cover him. As early as 1984 he considered running closely enough that he signed the paperwork he’d need to participate in the New Hampshire primary, though he didn’t send them in.

And reports of Biden’s tortured decision-making process were rampant. Friends were encouraging him; supporters and donors were keeping their powder dry and the family was even on board. Calls with advisors or a family meeting, were all seen as a signal that he was maybe, possibly, jumping in. A POLITICO reporter stood in line for hours to get a ticket to Biden’s taping of the “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” just in case.

When Biden rang up Maureen Dowd in August, to tell her the story of how he started considering a run because of a final wish expressed by his son Beau, it was already arguably late in the game. Whether Biden meant to or not, that conversation lit the media speculation embers ablaze, a fire which roared until the very last minute.

“Joe Biden camp to allies: Be ready,” read a story by CNN’s Jeff Zeleny last week. "No decision, but Joe Biden sounds like a candidate,” read a chyron zipping across the screen on MSNBC on Wednesday morning.

And after the announcement, many reporters expressed genuine surprise.

"At the end of the day, the takeaway [from conversations with sources] was the Vice President was trying to keep all his options open and really wanted to run for president and was giving himself the space to do that. And people came away from conversations with him thinking that he was seriously considering running for president, even leaning toward running," said one reporter who was on Biden watch.

Of course, none of these stories are falsified by Biden’s announcement on Wednesday. He didn’t say when he finally made the decision, nor whether he had decided and changed his mind somewhere along the line.

Almost all of the reporting centered on the timing question. Biden himself kept moving the deadline, initially telling reporters in February that he’d make the decision by the end of the summer. August was full of headlines claiming that Biden was “expected to decide after weeklong retreat.” But both the unofficial end of Summer (Labor Day) and the official one (Sept. 22) came and went without a decision.

"The ‘coverage' has been embarrassing,” former DNC Communications Director Mo Elleithee wrote in an email on Wednesday before Biden’s decision was announced in the White House Rose Garden. “Here’s the thing: His deliberation may be the most transparent in modern history. He’s thinking about it, he thinks he’s the right person for job, he knows it’s late in the process, and he’s not sure he’s up for it at this moment in his life. How do we know that? Because he’s told us. He’s not exactly playing coy. Everything he says and does now is part of that decision-making process. That’s it. So stop telling me that everything he says 'definitely sounds like someone who is/is not running for president.' It doesn’t. It sounds like someone who is trying to decide whether or not to run for president. You don’t know what’s going on in his head. So stop telling me you do. He’ll tell us soon enough."

Some senior reporters and editors in the D.C. media world pointed fingers at The New York Times, POLITICO and the television networks as media organizations who were fanning the Biden flames, writing Hamlet-on-the-Potomac stories seemingly every day. The media, they suggested, wanted Biden to run almost more than the vice president himself—to spice things up in what was turning into a two-candidate primary on the Democrat side.

Some reporters are, after all, just slightly biased in favor of the most interesting possible outcome.

Poll master Nate Silver, in a post headlined “How The Media Blew The Biden Story,” can only speculate: “A Biden run would be a great story for the media — it would get to sit back and watch the fisticuffs between Biden and Clinton, who is otherwise something of a dull, predictable story (‘inevitability’ is boring). That probably biases the media toward reporting on the few Democratic insiders who would have liked to see a Biden bid, and ignoring the large majority who were satisfied with Clinton.”

Even practical media strategies waited upon the decision with a presumption there might be a “yes.” CNN left the door wide open for Biden to jump in, creating a debate criteria for the first Democratic debate that would have allowed Biden to join on stage up until the last minute. CNN Senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta showed a photo of the extra podium brought in for Biden, just in case he decided to show up. After Clinton’s successful debate performance, the headlines started to change tone.

“Joe Biden may have missed his window of opportunity,” read a headline in the Washington Post after the debate.

After the decision broke, some patted themselves on the back for keeping their stories just off the ledge of “he’s running” though their stories pointed toward that possibility.

"Like everybody else we chased every twist and turn and always tried to be cautious not to report more than we really knew, which is why our coverage was limited and measured," said Washington Post senior politics editor Steven Ginsberg.

NBC News can claim to have gotten something almost exactly right in all of this. The outlet reported on Monday that the decision would come within 48 hours, though their own story indicated he was leaning toward a run. Biden’s final decision came 50 hours and 15 minutes after the story posted.

