With presidential ambitions ended, Biden’s legacy now forever tied to Obama

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WASHINGTON — Vice President Biden really made two announcements on Wednesday: The window for him to run for president has closed. His vice presidency has not.

“While I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent,” Biden said in the White House Rose Garden, with his wife and the president by his side.

Biden then proceeded to give a full-throated defense of the Obama record — what might have even been viewed as a campaign speech if his decision had been different. In a thinly veiled aside to former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Biden urged Democrats to run on Obama’s legacy.

“I intend to speak out clearly and forcefully to influence as much as I can where we stand as a party, and where we need to go as a nation. … I believe that President Obama has led this nation from crisis to recovery, and we’re now on the cusp of resurgence. I’m proud to have played a part in that.

“We’re making a tragic mistake if we walk away from, or try to undo, the Obama legacy,” he said.

It’s a legacy that Biden would have been inexorably tied to had he decided to run. While Clinton can oppose Obama’s trade proposals and Syria policy, a Biden campaign would have had no such room to navigate.

And now, having finally decided at age 72 that he’ll never have a presidential legacy of his own, Biden’s mark on history will forever be tied to that of a president a generation younger than he is. More than any other candidate, he would have had to run for a third term of Obama’s presidency. It would have been almost impossible to imagine a fourth.

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“The problem that sitting vice presidents have is that they are pretty much tied to the administration’s policies, and it’s difficult to separate ideologically from and administration you’ve been part of — particularly in Biden’s case when you’ve been a particularly influential part of it,” said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University and expert on the vice presidency.

Instead of distancing himself from his president or his policies — as his predecessors George H.W. Bush and Al Gore did as they ran for president — Biden did the opposite. In a forum on the vice presidency Tuesday, Biden said he’s been in lock step with Obama on every major decision.

“The president and I ideologically have had no disagreement. Zero. None. We’ve had tactical disagreements,” Biden said. “To this day we are sympatico on all the major issues.”

But then, true to form, Biden also created a mini-controversy over his revised account of whether he supported or opposed President Obama’s order to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011. In the 2012 campaign, he said he was skeptical, but on Tuesday he said he told the president privately to go forward with it.

Biden’s affable, freewheeling style is as refreshing as it was undisciplined, and it probably contributed to his decision to abort two previous campaigns for president in 1988 and 2008. But Biden also has strengths. He has unquestioned credentials in foreign policy, and the death of his son Beau from brain cancer this year revealed a vulnerable and human side few politicians dare to show publicly.

Obama has called Biden’s vice presidency “one of the more consequential” in history. “It was the best decision that I ever made politically, because I love this guy,” he said during a visit to Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pa. in 2013. “He’s got heart, and he cares about people, and he’s willing to fight for what he believes in, and he’s got some Scranton in him.”

The president has already given Biden a diverse portfolio of domestic and foreign responsibilities. He has been a top diplomat, middle-class advocate, crime policy expert, congressional relations director and stimulus “sheriff.”

But on Wednesday, Biden suggested he would take on one more responsibility — one that would seem to be the perfect fit for a vice president whose chief political skills are optimism, empathy and a proven ability to work across party lines even in the most polarized political environment.

“I believe that we need a moon shot in this country to cure cancer. It’s personal,” he said. “And I’m going to spend the next 15 months in this office pushing as hard as I can to accomplish this, because I know there are Democrats and Republicans on the Hill who share our passion, our passion to silence this deadly disease.”

With Biden committing to give his full energies to Obama for the next 15 months, the No. 2 executive has almost assuredly earned even more loyalty from the No. 1.

Still, the vice president couldn’t resist a wistful notion of what a Biden administration’s legacy might have been. “If I could be anything, I would have wanted to have been the president that ended cancer,” he said. “Because it’s possible.”

More coverage of Biden’s 2016 decision: