Vice President Biden plans to enter the contest for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, ending months of speculation about his intentions and delivering a jolt to an already unpredictable contest, according to XXX sources familiar with his decision.
Biden, who has been publicly grieving since the death of his eldest son on May 30, began telling associates on XX of his intention to launch a late-breaking campaign that will pit him against a pair of Democrats who have been well ahead of his decision-making process, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
A formal announcement could come within the next week, just in time to allow the vice president to appear at a critical party event Oct. 24 in Iowa. The three-way race among Democrats sets up a debate over which candidate is the rightful heir to President Obama’s legacy and whether the party needs a sharp break — as Sanders contends — from the policies of both Obama and former president Bill Clinton.
Biden’s entry into the contest comes after several months of declining popularity for Hillary Clinton, during which she has been dogged by an FBI investigation of the security of the private e-mail server she used during her time as Obama’s secretary of state. The controversy helped prompt a rise in Sanders’s standing from iconoclastic liberal to a more fearsome insurgent.
But Biden’s decision also arrives just days after what many consider Clinton’s best campaign moment so far: a commanding performance at the Oct. 13 debate in Las Vegas that left many party insiders suggesting the vice president’s path to victory no longer seemed plausible.
This announcement means, Clinton is a has been. Wanna wager? 