Inside Biden's final deliberations

st possible moment, once advisers told him Monday he needed to make a final decision. | AP Photo

In true Joe Biden form, the entire enterprise was always a little haphazard.

Long after the will-he-won’t-he speculation reached full tilt, Biden asked his chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, to put together a briefing book on where Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and the other Democratic 2016 contenders stood on the issues. The vice president hadn’t been paying close attention to the campaign.

He spent the last few weeks searching for the right feeling — within his family, within himself, within the crowds he was seeing.

He waited until the last possible moment, once advisers told him Monday he needed to make a final decision.

He needed to sleep on it, Biden said as he wrapped up calls Tuesday evening from the Naval Observatory.

On Wednesday morning at around 9 a.m., Ricchetti was telling people he wasn’t sure what Biden would do.

West Wing staffers were still trading theories about what would happen, when he might decide, what he was going to do, all through the morning. President Barack Obama started his day without knowing yet, either.

The vice president's office declined to comment. But conversations with people in the Biden orbit, advisers, White House staffers and others involved with the discussions about a possible presidential run over the last few weeks and days help explain why the prospects of a run ebbed and flowed so dramatically: Biden was ebbing and flowing that dramatically himself. Yet many of them went into the weekend thinking that at the last moment, Biden was going to be a yes.

The decision about a campaign manager was looking settled. On Sunday night, Draft Biden staffers were locking down social media and URLs for a new super PAC that they expected to start to support a run. The conversations were turning to how big or small the kickoff rally should be.

Aides showed up to work on Monday morning convinced he had finally made up his mind to run.

Then Biden arrived.

He was agitated, edgy. Suddenly, he was asking all sorts of operational questions again — who would he have right away, how was this actually going to work.

By midday Monday, people in touch with Biden had turned completely around. He was looking very much like a no.

Throughout the final days of the would-be campaign, Obama stuck to what he’d been telling top aides: Biden is still very much in the grieving process. The president held back — “a sounding board,” is how Obama’s spokesman Eric Schultz described his role on Wednesday afternoon — telling people how important it was that Biden make the decision on his own timetable. Comfort him, he’d urge people who were asking him what to do.

Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, who spoke to the vice president earlier in the week, came away feeling optimistic enough that he called several reporters Tuesday afternoon to tell them his union was acting as though Biden were going to declare. Others got their own calls, some going on for as long as half an hour at a time. They were coming away a lot less sure than Schaitberger, but they were holding out hope.

Backers in South Carolina had put together a detailed written plan of what to expect, and why they saw a path that would win him that primary, giving him a shot at the nomination. They’d sent it to Biden’s advisers — Ricchetti, the preparer of all the plans; Mike Donilon, his longtime political consultant and the chief agitator for a run; Ted Kaufman, his best friend and former chief of staff; and his son Hunter, who was also talking through a run with supporters.

Shortly after 11 a.m. Wednesday, Kaufman, Dr. Jill Biden and Valerie Biden Owens, the vice president’s sister and his closest adviser, arrived at the White House. Chairs were quickly set up for a last-minute event in the Rose Garden.

Several people who’d been deeply involved with the planning weren’t given a heads-up about Wednesday’s sudden change of plans. They learned about it from news reports or a few short messages that went around just before. Schaitberger was sitting on set at MSNBC, waiting to go on.

Rose Garden, they knew, was the giveaway: It was a no.

The healing process, Biden had famously told grieving military families months before, was when the memory of your loved one brings a smile to your face before it brings a tear. The good news, Biden said, is that he and his family are finally at that point with his beloved son Beau, who died at the end of May. The bad news for him was that they got there after the point when he thought he could mount a campaign that would actually have a shot at working. He wanted to run — but he knew it was too late.

He gave what could have been an announcement speech.

“To be able to be anything we want it to be, to do anything — anything — that we want, that’s what we were both taught,” he said, flanked by his wife on his left and Obama on his right. “That’s what I grew up believing. And, you know, it’s always been true in this country.”

All about possibilities. Just not, for this campaign, his own.

***

Since August, Biden staffers had reconciled themselves to the reality that the presidential speculation was probably going to end without much warning. He’d show up one morning, they’d say, and either he’d say it’s a go or tell them he was officially pulling the plug.

All those weeks, close Biden friends, family and former aides were expressing their own anxiety. Part of what was happening, people close to the vice president said, was that before Beau Biden’s health started its irreversible decline, he had already started transferring his dreams of being president onto his son. He’d never fully written off a 2016 run of his own, but he’d been letting the doors close.

Biden knew that the sudden late interest in him had a lot to do with the outpouring of sympathy over his son’s death. There was no joy in that tragic twist. People in rooms with him would notice his pained reaction in private to what would seem like good news for a run — almost like he didn’t want to be excited about something he would have traded in an instant to still have his son.

Sometimes within the same couple of hours, though, he’d come off so buoyant and excited or talking up how much his son Hunter wanted him to that he’d leave even skeptics convinced that he was going to run.

He kept signing off on the preparations for a campaign. He kept dropping little hints himself, just enough to keep people going, soaking up the cheers and applause —— what people who know him said was basically his brand of extreme extrovert public therapy. People in his orbit would leak enticing nuggets, like his supposedly private meeting with Elizabeth Warren — the rapid exposure of which took the Massachusetts senator’s camp by surprise.

Several who spoke to him in the past week noted, though, that even after the first Democratic debate, even in the runup to Clinton’s appearance at the Benghazi hearing Thursday, he didn’t bring her up.

“Throughout this whole process, it was always very clear that whatever her conditions were — good, bad or indifferent — was not part of a decision to run,” said someone close to the vice president’s deliberations.

Schaitberger pushed back on the sense Biden seemed to be giving off that he felt he was being bullied out of the race by the Clinton campaign or by a world of Democrats and journalists getting impatient.

“He wasn’t showing any frustration, because I don’t think he ever considered or paid attention to any of that in the first place,” he said.

Clinton, though, did come up in his deliberations. He needed to make a decision before she arrived at the hearing, people in the pro camp urged Biden, because otherwise he’d look calculating —— like he was just waiting to evaluate her performance. That would hurt the brand of authenticity that would be at the center of a campaign, they told him.

Clinton or not, other advisers said, the time had come. He had to make a decision so they could get the pieces moving by the end of the week, put out word, open a bank account, start the process for a formal kickoff event that would have likely been next week.

To a number of people helping talk through a run with Biden, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines on Saturday never looked like a good place to start, despite much media speculation to the contrary. He’d have to share the stage with the other candidates, and he wouldn’t have the money or the preparations put together to buy the tables to give himself a cheering section.

The rough plan was different.

By the end of September, people eager for a run who’d talked to Biden were already talking about what looked like a launch strategy: skip the first debate, leak that he was running this week, stage a kickoff the week of Oct. 26. Biden listened — in his office, on the phone, sitting by the pool at the Naval Observatory.

He seemed to many as though he was getting closer. There was the Bloomberg poll showing his numbers going up that popped on the limo ride back from going to meet Pope Francis. The phone calls to the early state supporters. The second- and third-circle members of the Biden orbit who were told to be ready to get on a conference call to hear about the decision first, whenever it came.

But by Monday afternoon, a chill had gone out among people who were pushing Biden. They couldn’t figure out what had happened, but several sensed that everything had come to a screeching halt.

Then came Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, dousing cold water on Biden in an interview with The Huffington Post that landed late on Monday afternoon, taking those around both men by surprise.

A month ago, Clyburn caught a lot of attention for saying how open he was to a Biden candidacy and how anxious he was about Clinton’s email server. Then Monday afternoon, he said, “I would not advise him to get in.”

Frantic messages started going back and forth between Biden’s advisers and Clyburn’s. What was Clyburn trying to say? Did the Clinton campaign somehow put him up to it? Should the vice president call?

Biden advisers’ whole concept of a race assumed poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, which they’d chalk up in large part to his late entry. But he needed to win South Carolina — and to do that, he would need major support among the Democratic establishment and African-Americans. Clyburn was key to both.

More than that, Biden idolizes Clyburn, particularly for his civil rights work. His words cut at the vice president politically and personally.

New History