Beating Hillary Clinton would be really hard, Steve Ricchetti told Vice President Joe Biden. But if you really do want to think about jumping into the presidential race — and this late — here are the meetings, the trips, the donor calls and everything else that you’re going to have to do.

Ricchetti, the vice president's chief of staff, is the force guiding Biden's deliberations over whether to run for president in 2016, a primary contest that would pit him against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.


Ricchetti knows what he's up against, because he used to play for the other team. Twenty years ago, as an aide in the White House, he was so close to the then-first lady that staffers called him “Rodham Ricchetti.''

These days, no one is in a more awkward spot than he is, Ricchetti's been telling people.

The ties couldn’t be closer: Ricchetti was tight with both Clintons — “I still love them!” he’s said in recent days — and was Clinton campaign chairman and John Podesta’s deputy White House chief of staff in the 1990s.





Now he’s the one building the plan to get his current boss to keep his old boss out of the White House.

“I have credibility on what it takes to be a great chief of staff,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman, Biden’s best friend and one of the very few people actually in the meetings with Biden and Ricchetti. “He’s one of the very, very best.”

Then again, Ricchetti’s joked to people, he was part of the so-called red team responsible for beating up Bill Clinton in the 1996 debate prep. He knows the Clintons’ vulnerabilities. And he knows how to press on them with a small team and not a lot of resources.

Biden’s circle is divided: There are those who want Clinton to needle him just a little more openly to push him to get in, and there are those who want Clinton to go nuclear and wake him out of what they think is a fantasy of how a race would really go.

That’s roughly how things fall in the very small meetings in Wilmington and Washington where the question of whether Biden should run for president is being decided: Mike Donilon in the gung-ho go-for-it camp, Kaufman supportive of wherever he lands, his read of the odds in flux.



Steve Richetti, left, talks with Bill Clinton. | Getty



Then there’s Ricchetti: trying to keep his thumb off the scale, laying it all out for Biden about what running would really take, what it would really mean.

“He’s a mechanic,” said a longtime friend and colleague of Ricchetti. “And that’s exactly what the vice president needs right now.”

Ricchetti knows that the Clintons will probably never forgive him if Biden runs. He’s trying to keep up some appearances though, telling people that his one rule for Biden is that he won’t go negative on Hillary Clinton, no matter what. They’re paying attention in Brooklyn.

“I would bet that he’s playing both sides,” said one person close to him. “He likes everybody to like him. He’s got long relationships, and he’s loyal to both.”

He’s been caught in the middle before. The Clintons tagged him as a leaker at the end of the 2008 campaign, but more importantly, Bill Clinton never quite forgave him for raising, in an internal meeting, the question of what they were going to do if someone made an issue of his infidelities. Ricchetti was trying to be helpful, to anticipate the question. Clinton did not take it well.

Ricchetti spent years trying to work his way back from excommunication, and Bill Clinton’s started talking to him again, though never with the same closeness. All the while, he was trying to get back into the game in the Obama administration — while David Plouffe and other senior advisers to President Barack Obama repeatedly blocked him because they figured he’d be too loyal to the Clintons, dead-set about violating their lobbyist ban for him and wary that he’d just turn around and leak on them too.

He tried to get into the West Wing. He tried to get in as Leon Panetta’s chief of staff. Biden heard that he was on the market — “if you ask me when’s the first time we met Steve or when we got to know Steve, I couldn’t tell you,” Kaufman said, “it’s just like we’ve always known Steve” — and pounced.

Biden insisted on him, though that required putting his foot down with Obama (who signed off, but had heard enough from Plouffe to tell the vice president to keep a handle on him). Ricchetti hasn’t forgotten that he’s only in because Biden got him there.

These days, Ricchetti is all over the West Wing, inspiring a mostly genial but exasperated hands-thrown-up, Richetti’s-always-just-Ricchetti response from Obama staffers trying to figure out what he’s ever up to, about Biden’s 2016 plans or anything else.

Ricchetti declined an interview request. People who know him say that after spending his career trying to be a background player, he hates the idea of a whole article about him.

The irony is that Ricchetti probably wouldn’t even have the Biden job if it weren’t for how the vice president feels about Bill Clinton.

“The Clinton world validation matters to him,” said one person who knows the vice president. “If they were held in high regard by Bill Clinton, then that meant a lot to Biden."

Ricchetti cashed out huge during the [George W.] Bush years, starting a high-priced lobbying firm that he acknowledged to friends was just an exile project, eager to dump it the moment he could get back in the game.





In other words, exactly the kind of revolving-door lobbyist Obama aides didn’t want to have to answer for hiring as they headed into the 2012 reelection campaign, the kind of creature of Washington that they professed to hate and have nothing to do with.

In the end, Ricchetti sucked it up and took a demotion to get back in — career paths don’t usually flow from deputy White House chief of staff to counselor to the vice president — spending a year and a half waiting for the top job to open in the Old Executive Office Building. He’s built up his relationship with Biden helping him think through and talk through his relationship with Obama and others around town, translating Washington to a vice president who never lived in the capital until he got this job and still sometimes puzzles over people who aren’t being straight or saying things out of strategy more than sincerity.

Those who’ve worked with Ricchetti in Biden’s office gush over him, call him Stevie. He’s probably one of the few people on Biden’s staff, Biden included, who’s not keenly aware of how much is in each paycheck, but they say that comes out not in the minivan he drives but in treating staff at Dairy Queens on 2012 campaign swings. The same way he coached his son’s junior high basketball team, he’ll call out to people he sees coming from way down the hall, or into the phone in an accent more nasal than has any right to be coming out of someone raised in Cleveland.

After decades in Washington, he has a network in the city that’s transformed a lot of the work around the vice president’s office. That’s helped him get a lot of conversations and meetings going so far, as Biden’s been looking into what to do. But like Biden’s, his network outside of the city isn’t much, leaving people questioning just how even the best orchestrated plans would translate into something that would work in Iowa, or South Carolina, or any kind of national scale.

Along the way, though, Ricchetti’s become an expert in the especially complicated art of keeping this vice president on track.

“Steve is one of the few people who could come in and voice an objection to something that was on the schedule or question a decision about a policy proposal,” said Julie Smith, Biden’s former deputy national security adviser. “The rest of the room is sitting there saying, ‘Steve, why are you doing this? ’— or sometimes, ‘Thank God that you’re doing this, because none of the rest of us dared to.”

Still deep in the grief over his son, Biden has had an especially hard time focusing. But it’s never been easy — even assigned by Obama to run the gun control effort after Newtown, the vice president was still stacking foreign trips and speeches onto his schedule until Ricchetti stopped him.

“Biden’s instinct was, well, he can do it all,” Smith said. “Steve was one of the ones to say, ‘Let’s be careful about balancing.’”