Former Vice President Joe Biden has been critical of his own party’s failings since leaving office. | Getty Biden launches PAC, keeping options open

On Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden will launch a new PAC, American Possibilities, giving him a way to support Democratic political candidates while keeping his own options open for a potential 2020 presidential run.

Officially, the group will be “dedicated to electing people who believe that this country is about dreaming big, and supporting groups and causes that embody that spirit," according to the PAC's launch materials


Biden has hired Greg Schultz, his political director during his second term as vice president, as the executive director of the PAC.

“Thinking big is stamped into the DNA of the American soul,” Biden wrote in a post that will go live on Medium in the morning. “That’s why the negativity, the pettiness, the small-mindedness of our politics today drives me crazy. It’s not who we are.”

Though he repeatedly bashed Donald Trump on the campaign trail last year and again at an appearance in New Hampshire in late April, Biden has been just as critical of his own party’s failings.

“I’m absolutely positive they want to be with us, but we have to prove again that we understand that hopelessness,” he said in New Hampshire. “We have to show them, we have to be the source of their hope.”

And he’s made clear in private, and to an extent in public, how disappointing he found Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and his problems with her as a messenger of the Democratic Party.

Though the PAC is geared toward helping other candidates, the website launching with it is centered on photos of Biden: holding a baby on the campaign trail, seated waving in front of a giant American flag, and locking arms with Rep. John Lewis and others in a commemorative march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

The email to supporters and donors ends on a tantalizing note: “See you out there.”

