Joe Biden isn’t running for president yet, but Hillary Clinton’s already running against him.

Clinton and her aides have their line—the vice president deserves the time and space to decide, they repeat over and over and over—and so far they’ve held off the heavy artillery.


Instead, they’re firing warning shots. Tightly targeted warning shots.

The hints from the campaign come in heavy: Biden would be to Clinton’s right if he ran, more out of touch with the party’s progressive base. Surrogates have sounded off, questioning his chances and his political abilities, wondering if he’d be up to the job. Clinton even leapt in herself, bringing him up out of nowhere as she spoke to a woman in a diner last week in New Hampshire to knock him for how disappointing he’d been when they were working on the bankruptcy bill in the Senate. That was followed by her campaign chair John Podesta, sprinkling a little of his own shade in front of the pro-Clinton Priorities super PAC in New York—it’s already too late for Biden to mount a real challenge, and he’s not going to decide for a few more weeks on top of that.

They’ve stepped up the roll-out of their endorsements and organization. Their operation is just so massive and well put together, they want Biden and anyone considering supporting him to think, there’s just no space left for him.

So sure, take your time, is the message people in and around the campaign seem to be sending—but if you end up at yes, you’re going to get hurt. Saint on the sidelines is far different from actual candidate, they want him to realize, when they and everyone else unleash on him, raking through every gaffe and every vote in 36 years in the Senate, digging through his personal life. In the campaign headquarters and in Clinton's wider orbit, they take care to say how much they like him, how much they respect him, don't want to say a bad word about him. But “Should a man like Joe Biden run?” is going to be a very different question for them than “Should a man like Joe Biden be president?”

They haven’t engaged as much as some around the campaign expected, or as much as some Biden allies (the ones who feel affection for him and feel like he’s being goaded into a run) were hoping, so that he’d be scared off.

Inside the Brooklyn headquarters, this has become a sensitive topic.

“Because of the personal tragedy and because he is beloved by the president and because he is beloved by so many staffers on both sides, they are super sensitive to doing anything that even whiffs of attacking him,” said a source close to the Clinton campaign.

To Biden and the people he’s talking to most about running, this is proof, they think, of just how much of a scare they’ve put into Clinton. On top of what’s public, they say they think the spate of stories a few weeks ago digging into his record on bankruptcy and the Crime Bill came, if not straight from the headquarters in Brooklyn, from people just far enough removed to give them plausible deniability.

“This is not a surprise,” said one person familiar with Biden’s thinking. “I think it’s pretty clear that they’re concerned about it.”

In the Clinton orbit, there’s a debate: would Biden be enough of an actual threat that they hope he stays out of the race, or would he be just trouble enough to get their stumbling candidate back into shape?

“She needs to be in a fight in order to be good. The coronation was always a bad deal for her,” said the person close to her campaign.

In the Biden orbit, there’s a different debate: Where’s the line between attacks that make him run just to stick it to the competition and those that convince him he’s better off staying out?

Biden has privately expressed surprise at how poorly Clinton’s handled the questions over her email server. He’s talked at length about how she’ll only divide the country more, people who’ve spoken with him say. Given the opportunity to compare himself to Clinton, his eyes flash and he knocks her down with a grin, at least behind closed doors.

With each passing week, though, anything outside of his emotional process—and one that’s now gone on long enough to start grating on some people close to him—has become less of a factor in his decision on a campaign.

Still, he is paying attention. Biden is a man deciding whether to run without doing an internal poll or a focus group. What matters less to him is the science of running -- how many field captains Clinton has in Iowa, for instance – than the feeling of it -- like how Brooklyn got his old friend New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan to endorse Clinton while he is still a possibility.

The Clinton campaign insists that Biden’s flirtation hasn’t done anything to change what they would have been doing anyway: the endorsements were long planned, part of a switch to a late summer roll-out phase after keeping the first few months purely focused on her. Same goes for the organizational support, particularly what they showed off around the Democratic National Committee summer meeting in Minneapolis last month. That all wasn’t because they were trying to squelch surging Biden speculation among Democratic activists, the campaign argues, but because the summer meeting was the last chance to see many of those party faithful before primary voting began.

Clinton dropped the bankruptcy bomb in New Hampshire last week, they say, not because she got on the plane looking to pick a fight; she just happened to have him on her mind. Everyone else watching the Democratic race closely does, after all.

The Clinton team hasn’t formalized a counter-Biden plan, according to campaign officials. There’s no official prepared binder on the shelf to pull down if and when word of an announcement leaks.

“Since day one, we’ve been implementing a strategy expecting a competitive primary,” a campaign official said. “The movements of opponents or potential opponents hasn’t changed it.”

