Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.

“The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.”

Vice President Joe Biden and I were riding the Amtrak to Philly on a frigid February day. I had asked about 2016 and whether America was ready, at long last, to elect a guy with such a mouth. There he was, barely cracking double digits in the polls, abandoned by the party big shots, and appearing, beyond all good sense, like he wanted nothing more than another crack at the presidency.


***

J oe Biden was gearing up for the 2012 campaign when Ted Kaufman mailed him a quote, in one of his periodic attempts to gently steer the high-maintenance muscle car that is his best friend and surrogate brother. The passage came from the soon-to-be Pope John XXIII, circa 1945, and was meant as a reminder that Biden, while on the brink of another four-year term, was reaching an age of reflection and reckoning. “I must not disguise myself from the truth,” the quote began. “I am definitely approaching old age. My mind resents this and almost rebels, for I still feel so young, eager, agile and alert. But one look in the mirror disillusions me. This is the season of maturity.”

(Click here for a Q and A with author Glenn Thrush)

Biden’s reply, scrawled on the original missive, came back fast, as if he had just been sitting there waiting for a chance to argue the point, in the form of another quote, this one from the poet Dylan Thomas. “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Biden may rage, but by any reasonable reckoning, night is falling on his singular four-decade political career. At 71, he is in the second year of a second White House term, restless in his role as second fiddle to Barack Obama, especially now that he is once again being upstaged by Hillary Clinton, Obama’s presumed Democratic heir. The tickled-alligator grin is still famously affixed to Biden’s face, but there’s a lot more going on behind those Ray-Bans these days.

Joe Biden in winter is still basically a happy warrior, but the past couple years have been a struggle for both relevance and leverage—a fight largely hidden from public view, between the presidential dreams he can’t quite relinquish and the shrinking parameters of a job he described to me as derivative, borrowed and “totally reflective of the president’s power.”

Almost all White House partnerships deteriorate in the end, undone by diverging politics, festering policy disputes—or simply human fatigue amid the strains of trying to turn what is inevitably a shotgun marriage into a love match. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were barely on speaking terms by the time the disputed 2000 election came around, with Gore furious at Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and Clinton appalled at Gore’s lame political skills. Even the celebrated team of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came unraveled by the final few years, as Bush abandoned the hawkish policies of his veep and turned to a more conciliatory set of advisers.

How does this one end?

Open In New Window OPTICS: Seven years of Joe and Hill (click to view gallery)

When we talk, Biden tells me he’ll respond by embracing “my guy” Obama even harder, but it’s clear he could use his guy to reciprocate: Over the past year, Harry Reid, the ornery Senate majority leader, has elbowed Biden out of the budget process he dominated not so long ago, and the White House seems OK with that. There was even the report last fall, over-torqued but nonetheless embarrassing, that Obama’s team had mused about booting Biden off the 2012 ticket in favor of Hillary Clinton. As if that wasn’t bad enough, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has taken it as his own personal mission to dismantle Biden’s elder statesman status, declaring in his recent memoir that Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Looming over it all is the question of whether Biden will run in 2016. “He’s in a predicament. It’s so big, it’s almost literary,” a member of Obama’s inner circle told me, shortly after a Washington Post/ABC poll showed Clinton leading Biden by an epic 73 to 12 percent, the widest margin ever recorded for a presidential frontrunner. “Never in his entire life has this man been better positioned to get the thing he most wants: the presidency. He’s climbed almost all the way to the top. And guess what? Somebody moved the ladder. How would you deal with that?”

He’s climbed almost all the way to the top. And guess what? Somebody moved the ladder. How would you deal with that?”

Forget the politics. Biden is enduring a trial that many people of his age—and that includes 66-year-old Hillary Clinton—are forced to confront: He can see the end of the road approaching, and fast, but the gas gauge still reads full. Biden simply isn’t ready to quit. It’s not clear he even knows how. He’s a comeback addict, a restless striver who believes that anyone who isn’t climbing is falling. Besides, it’s a much, much smarter bet to keep people guessing, no matter what he finally decides: Nobody in D.C. gains influence by declaring they are playing out the string. And sure enough, Biden has been out making that very point during a spate of media appearances this winter, insisting his decision won’t have anything to do with Clinton’s. “I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told me after an event in late January. “I’ll make the decision after the [2014] midterms. I’ve got a lot on my plate.”

Laugh if you want, but Biden is seriously considering a run, to hell with the naysayers who insist he is too old (73 in 2016) and too undisciplined (“Bidenism” after all, has its own entry in the Urban Dictionary). Every one of the dozen Biden friends I interviewed predicted he wouldn’t actually run for president in 2016. Then again, every single one also said it wouldn’t be a surprise if he jumped in at the last minute to “keep this great ride going as long as possible,” as one veteran Biden staffer told me.

At 71, Biden is in the second year of a second White House term, restless in his role as second fiddle to Barack Obama. | Pete Souza/White House

“He’s driven, that’s the best way to put it,” says Bruce Reed, who was Biden’s chief of staff from 2011 through the end of 2013. “He wants to be part of it all. … It’s not really ambition in the traditional sense. It’s a restless energy, the desire to keep going. … You never know what you are going to get.”



***

It’s a January morning in Detroit, and Joe Biden is running late. The snow is blowing sideways outside the MotorCity Hotel and Casino, a silver and neon Edsel of a place overlooking blocks of curiously tidy abandoned lots and many, many liquor stores. Biden’s motorcade is idling uneasily 15 minutes past his scheduled 9 a.m. departure time, and one of his Secret Service guys, the one who hates flying as much as Biden loves it, is peering at his watch, wondering how many times they are going to have to de-ice Air Force Two before the scheduled wheels-up at noon. Biden, whose carefree reputation belies an obsession with preparation, is upstairs laboring over the speech he will deliver at the nearby auto show.

The show is a high point of the year for Detroit, a city that can’t even afford to maintain its streetlights, and a good-as-it-gets photo op for the vice president in a midterm election year. But Detroit is still a surreal mix of rebirth and rot, and there is palpable disappointment that Biden, not Obama, has come to visit a troubled place that is among the nation’s bluest politically and blackest demographically.

When Biden finally makes it to the Cobo Center, he takes in the huge audience and offers a broad smile at all those shiny American-made Mustangs and Chrysler 300s lined up before him. By way of introduction, the head of the Detroit chamber of commerce offers a pretty fair existential assessment of Biden when he says, “He wakes up every morning and realizes, ‘Hey, I’m the vice president of the United States.’ … That’s gotta be kind of cool.”

It seems a little less cool today. Like many famous people who are assumed to be perpetually upbeat, Biden is in fact mercurial and tough to read up close, and he’s in an especially hard-to-pin-down mood on this morning. (“He’s an optimist, but, you know, not in La-La-Land,” is how his sister, Val Biden Owens, sums him up to me.) He’s badly jet-lagged from a one-day trip to Israel for a funeral (the classic vice-presidential burden), and while he loves cars, the American automobile has played an ambivalent role in his life. True, his father was a sales manager at a car dealership in Wilmington when he was a kid, and Biden remains a genuine gear-head who subscribes to Car and Driver alerts on his iPhone. But the darkest moment of his life was also automotive: More than 41 years ago, his young wife, Neilia, was behind the wheel of the family station wagon when a tractor-trailer slammed into it, killing her and the couple’s 13-month-old daughter, Naomi.

All of which seems to be on his mind when the vice president finally speaks, offering up a 20-minute performance that is a classic Biden hodgepodge. After shredding the script that had kept his motorcade waiting, he ends up with a ramble that includes a victory lap for the 2009 auto bailout he championed (“We and the American people placed a bet on all of you sitting in front of me. … We won!”), an homage to American muscle cars (“I love that Cadillac ATS!”) and a bit of campaign rhetoric, ready-made to outflank Clinton in the industrial heartland (“This is going to be the American century in manufacturing!”).

Still, what’s most noticeable today are the blue notes that cut through the Sousa blare. No big-time politician is as intentionally (or unintentionally) revealing of inner life as Biden, and being in Detroit seems to encourage him to mingle the personal and the political in ways that so often result in gaffes or self-revelation. Today it’s the latter, and his audience doesn’t quite know what to make of it when he starts in on what he’s lost: “My mother—my deceased wife—used to say that the greatest gift God gave mankind—and she meant it—was the ability to forget,” he says. “I’m being serious. Think about it. The greatest gift is the ability to forget—to forget the bad things and focus on the good.”

As the speech goes on, he toggles back and forth between Detroit’s bright future and his darker past. It ends with Biden offering a sentimental corrective to what is surely the most emailed story ever written about him— the Onion’s fake spread about a shirtless, tattooed Biden washing his ’81 Trans Am in the White House driveway. The real car is a ’67 Corvette, which sits under wraps at his house in Delaware. And its story plays an outsized role in Biden’s self-mythology.

“My dad didn’t have a lot of money, but what he did, he took my fiancée’s automobile. … It was a new Tempest, Pontiac Tempest, and my ’51 Chevy Bel Air. He said he was going to fix them up for us for a wedding gift,” Biden explains. “And then the day before the wedding he had us drive in and came in under the portico of the dealership, and there’s a brand-new 1967 327/350 [Corvette], Goodwood green, two-top convertible waiting there for us—as a wedding gift. Well, I still have it. I still have it. … I still love it.” The audience erupts when he tells them his two sons, Beau and Hunter, who were grievously hurt in the 1972 crash, bought him a new clutch as a Christmas present last year.

Joe Biden, Gearhead The vice president's car fetish is probably best known from an Onion spoof depicting a shirtless Biden washing a 1981 Trans Am in the White House driveway. But, according to Car and Driver editor John Phillips, who interviewed Biden back in 2011, when it comes to car chops, Biden's "the real deal." Did you know that Joe Biden was a “car guy” at the time you interviewed him? No, not at all. I thought the entire interview was going to be about the economics of the [auto] bailout. And it went all over the place. He has owned interesting cars in his life—he’s kept hold of that one ’67 Corvette, which was, to car guys, a famous year and a famous car and even though it had the smallest engine. It’s a very interesting car—worth a lot of money. Can you tell me more about the ’67 Corvette—why it’s so revered and what it says about him? Well, it’s an iconic shape—a really beautiful shape that’s been timeless. It still is a good-looking car today. When the Corvette first came out in the 50s, it had an inline six engine and was basically a luxury coupe. They called them "personal luxury coupes." And it wasn't really intended to be a lightning-fast performance car. But by 1967 it had morphed into a dedicated, hard-core sports car. And so, that car has always been an object of desire among car enthusiasts. To have a '67 Corvette in your garage means something. What about the ’56 Chevy? For a lot of guys that were in the generation of car collectors that preceded me, the ’56 Chevy was a big deal. And the reason was because right then, the aftermarket hot rod industry in California took off, and so suddenly you could buy hot rod parts and make the engine produce more horsepower and set the car up for drag racing. So there’s a whole generation of guys that refer to the ’56 Chevy as their start in car enthusiasm. Did Biden drag race? He told me some car stories that were off the record, just because they came under the heading of general male derring-do when you’re young. Biden said that he wasn’t very interested in NASCAR racing, but that he liked drag racing and had gone to a lot of drag races at a track in Delaware. And I said, “Well, did you ever drag race the car there?” And he said, “No, not legally.” So I assumed he meant that he had drag raced it on a public road. His dad was a used-car salesman … Biden told me that his routine was always to get up on Saturday morning, and he and his friends would wash and wax whatever car his dad had brought home. Then they’d collect money they had between them and see how far they could drive the car that weekend. He said that usually it was at least 200 miles. So at the end of the interview, you thought this guy’s no pseudo car-enthusiast … He’s the real deal.

The cloud has passed. It always does. A few minutes later, the vice president bounds through the convention center floor, hurdles over a low glass barricade and jumps into a Ford F-150 pickup truck, where he is given a five-minute tutorial on the control panel from Bill Ford, the only Big Three CEO not to seek a government bailout. “Thanks for saving our ass,” Biden stage-whispers, loud enough for the boom mikes to pick up. From there, it’s on to the Stingrays. Biden climbs into a yellow one with new General Motors CEO Mary Barra and grips the wheel so hard, smiles so broadly, you can imagine him muttering “vroom, vroom” inside the closed car.

When a reporter from the local Fox station asks him how he likes the show, the pearly whites flash, and Biden shouts, “Kid in a candy store!”



***

Biden’s best friend, Ted Kaufman, calls him “a guy who really, really lives in the moment,” and it’s clearly less a personality quirk than a necessity for a person with the vice president’s roiled past and uncertain future.

His late wife’s sweet-amnesia directive is never too far from Biden’s mind, and it serves as a check on his straying emotions. “In the course of 30 days—30 days—he was elected to the Senate. We had made it to the top, and then, in the blink of an eye, it was all over,” says Val, who acted as a stand-in mother for her nephews before Biden married his second wife, Jill, in 1977. “He was 29 years old. Why did he go on? … Because he knew that there was no other option, not for Beau, not for Hunt, not for himself. There was no option except to go on, and that’s always been his view, I guess.”

The American automobile has played an ambivalent role in Biden's life. Above, Biden tests out a Corvette at the Detroit auto show in January. | Paul Warner/Getty

That Biden has risen to where he is now is a small miracle, and he knows it. Fifteen years after Neilia’s death, he withdrew in disgrace from the 1988 Democratic presidential campaign, following allegations of plagiarism and fudging his law school ranking. Then came two nearly fatal aneurysms. “You ever have the roof cave in on you?” says Larry Rasky, another old Biden friend who served as a top campaign strategist in 1987. “That’s what it felt like.”

But move on he did. After the fall, he clawed his way back to respectability on Capitol Hill, leveraging his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee to turn himself into a legislator with a knack for negotiating bipartisan compromise on several of President Bill Clinton’s most important initiatives, including the assault weapons ban and Violence Against Women Act.

In the early 1990s, Biden was walking to the Capitol with What It Takes author Richard Ben Cramer, who had just published the definitive account of the collapse of Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign. They were deep in conversation when Biden spotted a man gesturing to them across the street and waved enthusiastically. Cramer was gobsmacked. It was John Sasso, who had been the campaign manager for Biden’s 1988 rival, Michael Dukakis, and was fired for pushing the plagiarism oppo to the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd and other reporters. Biden shrugged. “Forget it, that was a long time ago,” he said, even though it really wasn’t.

By the Bush years, Biden had reinvented himself again, this time as the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, an internationalist who voiced skepticism about, but didn’t oppose, the Iraq invasion. He was on everybody’s short list for secretary of state and even re-entered the presidential ring in 2008. The race rebranded him as an avuncular liberal with an incongruous skill set: a blue-collar populist and jet-setting foreign policy wise man rolled into one gabby package. But he hadn’t been a serious contender for the presidency since ’88, and he tallied less than 1 percent of the Iowa Caucus vote in ’08 before calling it quits on Jan. 3.

Biden moved on, yet again. He had never made a secret of his willingness to be considered for the No. 2 slot by Obama or Hillary Clinton, and when Obama picked him that summer, Biden quickly said yes. Even if Obama’s team had chosen him explicitly because his age and back story seemed to disqualify him from running to succeed his boss, Biden never fully subscribed.

“The difference between Joe and someone like Kennedy is that Ted gave up his ambitions,” Biden’s colleague from the Senate and fellow White House aspirant John McCain tells me. “Joe never stopped wanting to be president.”



***

With his electoral path to the presidency blocked, Biden, like so many veeps before him, pivoted to the inside track. Not long after Obama selected him, Biden turned to his soon-to-be chief of staff, Ron Klain, to provide him with a detailed analysis of how to attack the vice presidency. Biden wanted to avoid what he considered Dick Cheney’s overreach (he told GQ last year that Cheney “made it hard for government to function coherently”), but he still wanted as much power as he could figure out how to get.

To Biden’s surprise, Klain singled out his old boss Al Gore—not Cheney—as an example to avoid. Gore, Klain concluded, had erred by putting himself in a silo, owning only a few issues (the environment and a “reinventing government” project). That won him headlines but limited his impact and eventually exacerbated his estrangement from Clinton in 2000. Klain counseled Biden to embrace a much more ambiguous role that fit Biden’s take-it-as-it-comes personality, urging him to undertake, in Biden’s words, “every shit job in the world” that Obama didn’t want to do.

Fortunately for Biden, there was a whole lot Obama didn’t want to do, from managing the withdrawal from Iraq to babysitting unreliable and paranoid Afghan President Hamid Karzai and dealing with a squabbling Senate that Obama had been only too happy to leave.

“I have a fucking target on my back,” Biden told a confidant after the 2012 budget deal. He was right.

“When the president asked me what portfolio did I want, I said, ‘Base it on what you want of me to help you govern,’” Biden recalled in our conversation. “‘But I want to be the last guy in the room on every major decision. … You’re president, I’m not, but if it’s my experience you’re lookin’ for, I want to be the last guy to make the case.’” For the most part, Biden adds, Obama kept the promise.

The problem with that approach soon became clear, however: It imposed a loyalty tax of sorts, saddling Biden with a jumble of lost causes Obama wanted to offload. In 2009 and 2010, he was tasked with selling the administration’s massive but unpopular $787 billion economic stimulus bill, headlining an ill-timed “Recovery Summer” tour when public sentiment was souring on big government, and stumping for doomed Democratic congressional candidates facing the incipient Tea Party revolt. Later, Biden would be called upon to sell Obama’s never-going-to-happen jobs bill and to quarterback a futile effort to pass even modest gun control measures in the wake of the 2012 Newtown, Conn., school massacre. In each of these instances, Biden counseled Obama and his team to take bolder action, and privately expressed puzzlement that Obama wasn’t more vigorously selling accomplishments like his health care law. But to no avail.

Piotr Lesniak

Biden had a much greater impact on the Hill, where his relationships across the aisle allowed him to play the dealmaker on a slew of essential, if unloved, last-minute debt-ceiling and budget negotiations once Republicans seized the House majority in 2010. Senate Democrats were skeptical of his role, but Biden was undeniably a player, not least because of Obama’s inability—or unwillingness—to cultivate meaningful long-term relationships across the aisle. “You know, I disagree with Joe Biden on a lot of stuff,” says Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark.), who served as deputy political director in the Bush White House. “But this is an individual who understands relationships. … This is a person that—I think that if you put him in a room with a lot of these people on the Hill, you’d find a way to focus on what you agree on and have a product. And I just get a completely different feeling with the president.”

If Biden was a useful emissary on the Hill, he played an even more activist role on foreign affairs, taking on the Iraq portfolio and waging a series of pitched—though ultimately losing—battles with Clinton and Gates, Obama’s Republican holdover defense secretary, over the war in Afghanistan and other uses of force (including, famously, weighing in against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden). Biden had publicly described Cheney’s strong hand in national security decisions as “dangerous,” but he embraced his predecessor’s activist role by insisting on attending most top-level war planning meetings and forcefully airing his opinions in the Situation Room. In his Biden-flaying memoir, Duty, Gates says he advised Biden to follow the example of President George H.W. Bush, who as Ronald Reagan’s vice president had shared his opinions mostly in private with his boss. That approach “more befitted the dignity of the office,” Gates writes, but Biden “listened closely, thanked me, then did the opposite of what I recommended, following the Cheney model to a T.”

When I repeat the quote to Biden on that Amtrak ride, he practically leaps out of the faux-leather train seat. “That’s not the job the president asked me to do. That’s not the job I’ve done!” he says, palms striking the table between us. “The president has asked me, encouraged me, to challenge assumptions. … You know, I have as much experience as Gates, and that’s one reason [Obama] asked me to do this job.”



***

Biden’s congenital indiscipline demands extreme discipline from the people around him to compensate—and preparation too. (“When he cuts into you, it’s hard not to take it personally,” says one former staffer.) But the vice president relies on only a small circle of trusted friends and family; he could easily fit them into his living room, and often does. They are deeply devoted, an affectionate collection of worriers and planners, family and family friends: Kaufman, who, in addition to being Biden’s buddy, was his handpicked successor in the Senate and former chief of staff; his sister, Val; Tom Donilon (eventually Obama’s national security adviser); Tom’s brother Mike, probably Biden’s most trusted political adviser; chief of staff Steve Ricchetti; former Washington Post reporter Shailagh Murray, Biden’s increasingly influential deputy chief of staff; and Klain, his blunt and brainy former chief of staff. Jill Biden is her husband’s emotional foundation. She has raised her stepsons since she met Joe in the 1970s, along with the couple’s daughter, Ashley, and is an unfussy regulator who wrangles, refocuses and tells him to wrap it up. “Joe, come on, it’s melting!” she shouted when he was motor-mouthing at a recent ice cream social for the children of fallen soldiers.

But the Biden vanguard has never really cracked the Obama inner circle; in part, that was because their boss played an old style of instinctual politics, as opposed to the Big Data, metrics-driven game mastered by the president’s political team. “It’s always been a puzzle to me,” says one top Obama strategist. “He’s all about his gut, not analytics, and I guess he just thinks that it’s enough to build relationships, that all of these people will eventually flock to him.”

As Obama’s first term drew to an end and the 2012 campaign geared up, Biden seemed to recognize he needed to move beyond his tiny circle if he wanted a political future. Yet nearly every move to expand his political team was blocked by Obama’s sharp-elbowed protectors, according to several Biden and Obama aides I interviewed. If there was a moment when Biden could have asserted himself as a free agent, willing to buck the president’s political team, it came (and went) in 2011. Biden didn’t ask for much, just a few side trips to see potential 2016 donors, a schedule that took him to battleground states where he could build his blue-collar brand. But Obama’s campaign hands set the tone early on: This was an all-for-one operation, and the one was Barack Obama, not Joe Biden.

In the fall of 2011, Biden’s top in-house political aide at the time, Alan Hoffman, quietly added a few dinners with top Hollywood and Silicon Valley fundraisers onto a previously scheduled January 2012 trip to the West Coast. When Obama senior adviser David Plouffe and campaign manager Jim Messina caught wind of the plan, they shut it down. Plouffe was tasked with laying out the ground rules and told Biden that everything he said or did needed to be cleared with the Chicago campaign headquarters first. “We can’t have people going off doing things on their own,” Plouffe told Biden. “Everything has to be part of the larger plan.” Biden fumed, but he swallowed the indignity—even as he continued to press for trips that dovetailed with his own ambitions, to Iowa, New Hampshire and the Midwest.

Bigger internal battles were brewing over the staffing of the vice president’s campaign-year team, which Obama’s political minders controlled just as tightly as his schedule. Around the time of the fundraising dust-up, Biden singled out Kevin Sheekey, then New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s top political adviser, to replace the outgoing Klain as chief of staff. Plouffe and Co. instantly vetoed the move, arguing that Sheekey’s first loyalty would always be to his billionaire patron, and that his close relationship with the New York press corps would result in leaks aplenty. Biden reluctantly accepted the decision, then quickly countered with a second choice: Clinton White House veteran Steve Ricchetti. The Ricchetti pick also was killed, in part because Plouffe said his background violated the president’s no-lobbyists pledge—but mostly because Ricchetti was deemed to be too chummy with the Clintons and too much of a “free agent” who would look after Biden’s interests first.

The vice president relies on only a small circle of trusted friends and family. Above, Biden greets his family after the October 2012 vice presidential debate in Danville, Ky. | Mark Makela/Corbis

This time, Biden was livid. He appealed directly to Obama, who initially deferred to Plouffe’s judgment. Biden pressed Obama harder, arguing that he “needed to have his own people to do this job,” as one aide briefed on the interaction put it. Obama finally assented—with the caveat that Biden had “to keep Steve from coloring outside of the lines.”

If the VP won that fight, he lost the bigger one for access to Obama’s decision-making circle—especially after Biden infuriated Obama by publicly declaring his off-message support for gay marriage, just as the 2012 campaign was entering the homestretch. Obama’s team didn’t buy Biden’s explanation that the gay-marriage endorsement was accidental—and, until recently, Obama’s team blocked Biden from doing much national media to keep him from shredding the talking points. The freeze-out was not subtle: The vice president was personally excluded from planning meetings he had been invited to attend four years earlier, and his people were treated with open contempt in the weeks following the gay marriage controversy.

The others at the Biden retreat also came away feeling that Clinton would ultimately decide not to run—an indication of stunning prescience or group delusion.

Being managed into a box by Obama’s cocky campaign team only exacerbated Biden’s innate insecurity and drive for independence. When rumors surfaced in the months leading up to the 2012 campaign that he would be chucked overboard for Clinton, the Obama campaign dismissed them, but not quite forcefully enough for Biden, even though he had been assured and reassured by the president and his top aides that no such plans were in the works. At one point, after Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn and New York Times columnist Bill Keller had started an unofficial campaign for the swap, a peeved Biden approached a top Obama aide and suggested, “We need to start pushing back a little bit harder on this.”

In fact, there was a sliver of truth to the rumors. But Biden had no idea at the time that Obama’s polling operation had begun inserting questions into focus groups about Clinton’s viability as a vice presidential replacement, a revelation that surfaced only late last year in Double Down, the campaign tell-all by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Despite Obama’s habit of impatiently cutting off his rambling No. 2 midsentence in front of aides, Plouffe told me the dump-Joe polling never even led to a discussion among Obama’s senior advisers (in part because hitching Clinton to the ticket seemed to offer no significant benefit). “The loyalty flows both ways,” Plouffe says. “The president strongly believes that.”



***

The day after the 2012 election, a buoyant Biden strolled to the back of Air Force Two to outline what he expected his job would look like over the next four years: “I think I’ll probably be asked to play a similar role on the debt issue that we did last time. I think my reaching out to the Congress, the Senate. … I also know I’ll be doing a lot of foreign policy, so it will be whatever the issue of the day is.”

But the seeds of Biden’s marginalization were sown on Dec. 30, 2012, arguably the high-water mark of his influence: With less than 36 hours left before the country plunged over the fiscal cliff, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took the extraordinary step of declaring on the Senate floor that negotiations were at a standstill and begging for the vice president’s intervention. “I need a dance partner,” McConnell pleaded. Biden was delighted to get into the game, brokering delays to across-the-board budget cuts in exchange for a rollback of tax breaks for families earning $450,000 or more. Biden was publicly jubilant, flashing a bit of the pre-1988 bravado he had masked over the years. When reporters at the Capitol asked him what the main selling point for the deal was, he half-jokingly replied, “Me.”

Behind closed doors, though, Biden was telling friends, “It was a terrible spot to be in.” You can’t show up the newly reelected leader of the free world, not to mention the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who had been grousing for years that Obama and Biden weren’t driving hard-enough bargains, without the expectation of a backlash. “I have a fucking target on my back,” Biden told a confidant.

He was right. The reckoning came less than a year later. During a new round of debt-ceiling and budget negotiations in the fall of 2013, on the brink of what would become a debilitating government shutdown, Reid told Obama’s staff that he wanted Biden out of the talks between Reid ally Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Mitt Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Obama complied without much protest. When it was disclosed that the Bidens were spending part of the government shutdown at Camp David, McCain quipped that his old friend had been placed in “the witness protection program”—and Biden privately groused that he was getting caught in the crossfire between Obama and Reid.

When Obama gathered Senate Democrats in the White House shortly after the deal to reopen the government was announced, Biden and Reid sat icily in chairs across the room from each other, barely trading glances. Obama acknowledged the tension and joked, “This is a great country where a kid from Searchlight, Nevada, a mixed-race kid from Hawaii and a kid from Scranton can get along.” The combatants, according to a senator who was in the room, laughed politely.



***

Reid’s snub capped a miserable year for Biden personally. In the summer, doctors discovered a mass on his son Beau’s brain and operated on it. Although the vice president made a show of business as usual, he was shaken and distracted (“When you have a kid who has a 103 degree fever, you never deep down think he’s going to die. After what’s happened in Joe’s life, he doesn’t have the luxury of thinking like that. … The Beau thing consumed him,” Kaufman says), and he refused to broach the topic of his political future for much of the rest of 2013. Only after November, when doctors gave Beau a clean bill of health, did Biden appear to those around him to be entirely focused on what comes next.

Biden remains skeptical of Obama’s cautiousness. “Look, I just have more of a populist strain than Barack does,” he said.

With Plouffe and Co. now gone, Biden found a more receptive audience in Obama’s new chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and communications director Jennifer Palmieri, who initiated, in the words of one West Wing staffer, a “do-right-by-Joe” initiative. With the gun control push thwarted, Biden and his staff quietly began agitating inside the West Wing for a bigger role in the second term. During one of his lunches with Obama in December, Biden brought up the idea of quarterbacking a year-long initiative to streamline and reform worker education programs around the country; Obama, who had been considering something similar, agreed. Biden’s high-profile TV appearances ebbed significantly in 2013, in part due to lingering tensions from the 2012 campaign—but mostly because his time was increasingly occupied by his son Beau’s uncertain health. In the last few months, the vice president has been much more visible, starting with appearances on all three network morning shows after this year’s presidential State of the Union address and followed by sit-downs on The View and Seth Meyers’s new late-night show on NBC.

Over the Christmas holidays, Biden convened a series of meetings at his secluded two-story house in Wilmington to discuss his strategy for the next two years, surrounded by his sister, son Hunter, Kaufman, Klain, Ricchetti, Murray and Mike Donilon. The basic plan entails hitting the road as much as possible to campaign for candidates in this year’s congressional elections and to tout infrastructure improvements around the country. Klain, according to several sources, has drafted another one of his famous memos outlining the narrowest of paths for positioning Biden in the 2016 race: either as a progressive alternative to Clinton or as an heir apparent, ready to pounce if she decides not to run. Klain predicted there was a “significant” chance Clinton would take a pass, due to illness or a reluctance to endure the personal trials of another presidential run. The others at the Biden retreat also came away feeling that Clinton would ultimately decide not to run—an indication of stunning prescience or group delusion.

One modest step Biden continues to resist, according to several sources, is setting up a leadership PAC to raise and dole out cash to other Democrats; he hates the prospect of dialing for dollars and thinks it would be organized too late in the cycle to have a real impact anyway.

Biden is considerably more energetic in defending his reputation, which has come under increasing attack, to his profound annoyance. In January, when Gates published his scathing accusation that Biden had been chronically wrong about foreign policy “over the past four decades,” an indictment that spans everything from his opposition to the surge of troops in Afghanistan to his advocacy for a plan to split Iraq in three, Biden’s team huddled quickly with the West Wing on a damage-control plan that began with an official White House statement declaring Biden a “statesman.” The Biden team understood how the Gates episode played into Clinton’s hand, portraying her as a serious, disciplined leader and reliable Gates ally in contrast to the capricious Biden, always waging what Gates claimed was an unfair rear-guard action against the Pentagon’s national security experts.

Tellingly, when I ask Biden if Clinton was too hawkish on foreign policy, he responds by steering the conversation back to Gates. “I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America,” he says. “You talked about Gates just before, I’ll set my record of prognostication of whether the decisions we made, that I recommended, that he recommended—that others recommended [against his own]. … Who has a better batting average? I feel confident in my ability to make judgments of consequence on foreign policy. It doesn’t mean I’m right on everything, but I do believe I understand the world.”

Understandably, Biden’s mind is much on Clinton these days, and he has often told friends he thinks he can beat her because he has seen her up close and judges himself at least her equal. (Like every other prominent Democrat with a sense of self-preservation, he is reluctant to criticize her publicly, saying “I’m not getting into that” when I ask him to compare Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom with current Secretary of State John Kerry’s.) He told me he was “as qualified as anybody” to be president, and, more pointedly, he has been telling friends he thinks he’s “the most qualified,” a clear reference to Clinton, according to three of them I talked to.

The Biden-Clinton relationship is friendly, but complicated. During Obama’s first term, Biden hosted Clinton for regular Tuesday breakfasts in his study, and he believes he played a critical role as her “Obama whisperer,” helping her to understand the boss during the first year when the two former combatants were reconciling. People close to both say the breakfasts also gave him insight into Clinton’s ambivalence about living in the White House, the shackles of fame and what Biden has described privately as “her burden of having to run for president.”

That sense of obligation is what makes Clinton a principled person, Biden believes, but it also puts her in a defensive crouch at a time when the party’s base is still yearning for the progressive audacity that Obama promised but couldn’t quite deliver. “I’m not sure this is a moment for caution or deliberateness,” Biden recently told a friend.

For now, Biden is coping with the ambiguity of his predicament, but he increasingly can’t abide petty humiliations, especially from those hopping aboard the growing Clinton bandwagon. He was beside himself, several administration officials told me, when Messina, now at the helm of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, told the New York Times that his organization would almost certainly be backing Clinton in 2016 if she decided to run. In the summer of 2013, Messina had assured Biden—during a meeting in the vice president’s West Wing office—that the PAC was likely to remain neutral, partly out of deference to Biden. But over the months, Messina had become less categorical as he faced pressure from big fundraisers who wanted the party apparatus arrayed behind Clinton without delay. Right before the Times story popped, Messina called Obama’s deputy chief of staff, Alyssa Mastromonaco, and Ricchetti to say he had gone further than he had intended in the article—he claimed he had only meant to signal Clinton’s strong frontrunner status. But Biden viewed the move as a slap in the face, and didn’t respond when Messina reached out to talk things over, according to an administration official with knowledge of it.

It’s not lost on Biden that Messina, among the Obama aides once tasked with harnessing Biden’s wayward tongue, faced no serious recrimination from the White House for his pro-Clinton utterances. Still, for all the scratchiness, Obama and Biden seem to be in sync strategically, at least on the economy, these days. Both are increasingly bent on addressing inequality and using a minimum-wage hike as a cudgel to batter Republicans. But, now as always, Biden remains skeptical of Obama’s cautiousness. “Look, I just have more of a populist strain than Barack does,” he told an associate recently, a statement that clearly hints at 2016 product differentiation from Obama and Clinton, a desire to emphasize that he’s his own man.

He wants to be part of it all. … It’s not really ambition in the traditional sense. It’s a restless energy, the desire to keep going.”

“It’s either going to be me or someone else who is going to make this argument in the Democratic Party,” Biden tells me as the train rattles through southwest Philly. “When productivity increased, when profit increased, the people who are the reason for the increase were to share in the bounty. That’s what was settled in the late ’30s on collective bargaining, the Fair Labor Standards Act. … Guess what? The workers are getting screwed.”



***

So why would a septuagenarian abandon a dignified ending to a long career in public service for another quixotic quest for the presidency? He doesn’t want the ride to end—and he has spent years, nose pressed to the glass, believing that the people on the inside aren’t any better than he is.

“I think he’d still like to be president. Hell, I’d still like to be president,” says McCain, who has remained a close Biden friend since their days in the Senate together and is a not-infrequent Biden dinner guest. “But there’s a difference between liking being president and actually [getting elected], and I kind of get the impression, without him saying it, that he knows how formidable Hillary would be.”

Biden and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx get a tour of a new Amtrak car in Philadelphia in February. | David Lienemann/ White House

Some days, though, when Biden rushes into a grand public building with that big smile and phalanx of beefy Secret Service guys, it still seems so attainable. When he arrives to unveil a new electric Amtrak car at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, he’s doing the full Harry Truman, telling the crowd of 600 union workers and local Democrats how happy he feels when fog locks down the big-city airports and forces all those rich suits to take the train with him and the regular people. The audience roars.

From where Biden stands in the front of the room, they really love him. But I interview a half-dozen people in the crowd, and they all want Clinton to run. And it’s not just this crowd. “I’ve been around a lot of politicians in my life, and Joe’s really the most extraordinary, the most honest, the most authentic in a lot of ways,” says former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Biden friend who campaigned with him in 2008. “But obviously I remain devoted to Hillary.”

So, yes, Biden in all likelihood won’t be the next president, and, yes, he knows that as well as anyone. But that might not be enough to keep him out of the race. And why should it? He provides a dash of humanity in an increasingly colorless, cash-driven and dehumanized process. The things that make Biden so unfashionable—his affection for politics and the politicians who practice it, his boundless love of bullshitting, the rush he gets from cutting a deal—would, at the very least, offer a stark contrast to Clintonworld’s calculated opacity, palace intrigue and cult of personality.

When I ask Biden what his 2016 selling points are, he shoots back with a debate-

table summation: “I think I’m qualified by the record I have demonstrated over the years, by the experience I have, by the significant knowledge I have of not only foreign policy but individual leaders in foreign countries and domestically as well.”

Biden is a guy who grew up around car salesmen in Scranton, and he has picked up a salesman’s habit of collecting aphorisms from the people he talks to, little life lessons that fortify him on days when nobody’s buying. A story he’s been telling lately comes from a veteran of his security detail, Billy Davis, a standout college defensive back whose 47-yard punt return in the 1982 Orange Bowl powered underdog Clemson to the national championship over heavily favored Nebraska. The riff starts with Biden asking Davis why in the hell anybody would want to subject themselves to the bone-crunching abuse of returning punts.

“It’s just me back there,” Davis replies, in Biden’s retelling of the story. “I’m the guy with the ball, and 11 guys are trying to get me. It’s great! Punt it to me!”