AP Photos Fourth Estate The Biden Dither Some candidates are never more popular than when they’re not in the race.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

Vice President Joseph Biden has bestowed upon the press corps an early Christmas gift—his presidential campaign dither.

Scheming with top aides and allies about running, plotting with Hillary Clinton frenemy Sen. Elizabeth Warren and sounding out the White House staff, Biden’s energetic decision not to decide today or tomorrow or next week about entering the race has filled the news creek, which generally runs low in August. The Wall Street Journal has him “ leaning” toward a run. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls his candidacy “ more likely than not.” California Gov. Jerry Brown, dithering at one step removed, told Meet the Press that if he were Biden, he’d give a campaign “serious consideration.” And the Washington Post renders its own “Biden Boomlet Turns Serious” verdict this morning.


Like most campaign dithers, Biden’s isn’t very heartfelt. His White House lust expressed itself first in 1984, and then again in 1988, when he actually announced. Had he been elected, he would have been the youngest president since John Kennedy. Alas, plagiarism charges drove him out of the race. Many dithering years later, Biden ran a second time, in 2008, to massive voter indifference. No fool, he met his White House ambitions half way by taking a spot on the victorious Barack Obama ticket.

Contrary to folk wisdom, the vice president is not a heart-beat away from the presidency. Having no real power, he’s not even in the next zip code. Just as the appetite grows while eating, the craving to don the presidential robes only swells with proximity to the office. How else to explain Dan Quayle’s hapless campaign in 2000, eight years after he was cashiered as vice president? You see Biden’s hunger for the office in the whiteness of his teeth, the grimace of his smile, the awkwardness of his back-slaps and in the acrobatic balance of his dither.

One function of a dither is to freeze the other candidates. They can’t campaign against you in earnest until you declare. Hell, they might not even notice you exist! A well-executed dither can also delay potential supporters and potential donors from committing to other candidates, and encourages them to obsess on the ditherer. To dither is to invite courtship and attention, and to gather leverage. Even non-ditherers understand the power of the dither. Hillary Clinton faux-dithered earlier this year about running—not because there was much of a chance that she wouldn’t run but because she wanted to time her announcement for maximum impact. To announce on your own timetable requires that you make dithering moves if not dithering statements. The Clinton email story, which broke in early March, moved her to announce in mid-April in hopes of diluting that controversy.

The dither isn’t always an exercise political manipulation. Sometimes a candidate, like Biden, dithers for personal reasons. As we all know, Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer in late May—not even Richard Nixon could campaign while his child was dying. On occasion, the dither comes from pride, as the candidate sings “ I Want You to Want Me” to his prospective supporters and expects them to sing back. Others are born ditherers: New York Gov. Mario Cuomo dithered not only over presidential campaigns but over Bill Clinton’s offer of a seat on the Supreme Court. Some potential candidates, such as Colin Powell in 1996, have looked like ditherers because they considered it undignified to chase the prize. They were waiting for support to coalesce around them, awaiting the nod from party bosses, as was the general case during 19th century presidential campaigns. In truth, every politician desires a spontaneous outburst of support, but some modern candidates have gotten ridiculous about it.

Contributing to the Biden dither has been his day job as vice president. As long as Biden keeps his announcement speech hidden and locked in a top desk drawer, he remains the distinguished vice president, above politics, both petty and substantive. As vice president, he can hedge and waffle in the name of the nation. He can keep his options open. He need not even voice his own political opinions because he exists to serve the president. He’s not the vice president; he’s semi-presidential!

But the minute the vice president announces for the big job, his status shrinks to the size of a Chicago ward heeler. He’s just another pol. A late Biden entry into the race may have been pre-ordained for that reason: By dithering he has preserved his sacred mojo as a government official until the last possible moment. But by declaring his candidacy he also declares his independency from the president, freeing him to speak his own mind again. This is an act better performed in September, when the nation and the media are back from vacation and paying attention, and when fund-raising and gearing up for the primaries is still doable.

For the first time since imagining himself president in 1988, Biden finds himself the object of national political interest. Even though he appears to have engineered the whole thing, the current boomlet looks and feels like a draft. But has anybody broken the news to him that the minute he undithers, he’ll just go back to being Joe Biden? And, unfortunately for him, the nation’s craving for a Biden presidency has already been field-tested—twice.

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Hither, slither, smither, thither, whither, wither, with her, and zither all rhyme with dither. Send your verse to [email protected] . For pure poetry, subscribe to my email alerts ; for doggerel, see my Twitter feed; and for twaddle, seek my RSS feed.