Joe Biden Will Not Run for President in 2016

Vice President Joe Biden, flanked by his wife, Jill Biden, and President Obama, announced he would not run for the presidency, citing family considerations. 

 Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Wednesday that he would not be a candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign, bringing to a close a three-month exploration that began shortly after the death of his eldest child and threatened to fracture the Democratic Party.

Mr. Biden’s decision, announced in the White House Rose Garden with President Obama looking on, ends one of the most public episodes of indecision about a political path since Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York left a plane bound for New Hampshire idling on a tarmac in 1991 as he fretted over whether to run for president.

With just 15 weeks until the Iowa caucuses open the voting, Mr. Biden’s decision also closes the door on one of the biggest potential challenges to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s second attempt at capturing the Democratic nomination.

“Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time, the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination,” Mr. Biden said. “But while I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent.”

Indeed, he used the rest of his 13-minute speech to outline the case he would have made as a candidate and even take a few implicit jabs at Mrs. Clinton.

Without mentioning her by name, Mr. Biden criticized Mrs. Clinton’s assertion in last week’s Democratic debate that the Republicans are her enemies. “They are our opposition; they’re not our enemies,” he said, repeating a point he has made several times in the last 48 hours. “And for the sake of the country, we have to work together.”

Reading from a prepared text flashed on flat screens in the Rose Garden, Mr. Biden argued against the sort of hawkish interventionism Mrs. Clinton has championed in the Middle East and elsewhere. “The argument that we just have to do something when bad people do bad things isn’t good enough,” he said. “It’s not a good enough reason for American intervention and to put our sons’ and daughters’ lives on the line, put them at risk.”

Mr. Biden seemed to chide Mrs. Clinton for distancing herself from Mr. Obama lately, as she has done on trade, Syria, Arctic drilling and other issues. “Democrats should not only defend this record and protect this record, they should run on the record,” he said.

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Mrs. Clinton, in a written statement reacting to Mr. Biden’s decision, made no mention of the vice president’s apparent criticism of her.

“Joe Biden is a good man and a great vice president,” she said. Praising his “passion for our country” and his “devotion to family,” she credited him for a record of fighting for the middle class. “And I’m confident that history isn’t finished with Joe Biden.”

The end of the vice president’s flirtation with a race came a week after Mrs. Clinton’s steady performance in the first Democratic debate settled nerves among many in the party worried about her troubles solidifying her front-runner status. New polls in the last day or two suggested that she had regained some ground against her closest competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and that Mr. Biden, if he did jump in, had lost some traction.

Mr. Sanders, who now emerges as the lone figure seriously challenging Mrs. Clinton for the nomination, welcomed Mr. Biden’s decision and thanked him for a lifetime of public service. “Joe Biden, a good friend, has made the decision that he feels is best for himself, his family and the country,” Mr. Sanders said in a statement.

Dominating Mr. Biden’s consideration over the last three months have been personal considerations. His ambivalence about running was rooted in raw, and understandable, emotion: By his own account, the vice president has been not entirely himself since his son Beau, the former Delaware state attorney general, died of brain cancer in May. An aide said Mr. Biden made his decision not to run on Tuesday night.

“Beau is our inspiration,” Mr. Biden, who turns 73 next month, said in his remarks in the Rose Garden. But despite the grieving process, Mr. Biden said his family had nonetheless blessed another run for the White House, if he had decided to make it. “The family has reached that point,” he said as his wife, Jill, stood next to him.

Beau was the second child Mr. Biden had lost: His 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, and his first wife, Neilia, died in a car accident decades ago.

At the wake for his son, Mr. Biden told friends that Beau, in his final days, had said he hoped that his father would run for president. Mr. Biden shared that story repeatedly in the weeks to follow. It struck many who heard it as a form of therapy for a grieving man and not necessarily an indication that he would run.

But over the summer, lingering questions about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, combined with the emergence of Mr. Sanders as Mrs. Clinton’s strongest opponent in the primary, helped persuade Mr. Biden that there could be an opening for him.

His aides were deeply divided over whether Mr. Biden, who had run unsuccessfully for president in 1988 and 2008, should try again, especially when so many of the party’s top donors and veteran strategists, including many of Mr. Obama’s old advisers, were supporting Mrs. Clinton.

But Mr. Biden continued to ponder entering the race and made overtly political appearances, like one at a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh, while also sitting for an emotionally raw televised interview with Stephen Colbert near the end of summer. He spoke of breaking down unexpectedly and of being uncertain about whether he had the emotional fuel, as he sometimes put it, for a long campaign after such a painful loss.

Questions persisted, as they have throughout his career, about whether Mr. Biden could put together a strong enough team to be successful. Never known as a good fund-raiser, he did not begin courting donors until September, and he did not always do so in earnest. And though many potential campaign aides were approached about jobs, the planning remained haphazard until the moment the vice president made his decision.

A television commercial put together by Draft Biden, a “super PAC” — which relied entirely on Mr. Biden’s biography and on a speech he gave this year, days before his son’s death, about the 1972 accident that killed his first wife and their daughter — seemed both to signal the enormous interest around his pending decision and to telegraph the potential blowback he could encounter if he went forward. Some Democrats called the ad exploitative, and Mr. Biden’s aides — who made clear that he had not approved of it — quickly requested that it be pulled, and it was.

At the same time, Mrs. Clinton’s allies prepared for what would have been a messy, grueling campaign against a rival whose greatest political calling card has been his authenticity. Mr. Biden would most likely have faced difficult questions about his record as a senator, including his role in passing anti-crime legislation in the 1990s that has now come under attack by proponents of criminal justice reform, like the Black Lives Matter movement. And he risked having his family — including his son, Hunter, a lawyer and businessman who was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for drugs in 2014 — pulled into the fray.

Before Beau became ill, Mr. Biden had contemplated entering the race. He had been deeply wounded by the rush toward Mrs. Clinton by so many people who had served or donated to Mr. Obama. Mr. Biden had often felt he was denied a certain level of respect by Mr. Obama’s aides, particularly after the 2012 re-election campaign.

Some people close to Mr. Biden believed that he wanted to set the terms of the end of his electoral career himself, as opposed to have them dictated by the political shadow that Mrs. Clinton had cast over him.

In his remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said he would focus on his final stretch in office and gave little hint about what might come after that. He made a forceful argument for policies he said would benefit the middle class, including expanded aid for college and child care, revamped immigration rules and higher taxes on the wealthy.

“We intend — the whole family, not just me — we intend to spend the next 15 months fighting for what we’ve always cared about, what my family’s always cared about, with every ounce of our being,” he said.