Vice President Joe Biden reminisced about his losing 2008 presidential run while speaking at Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin’s steak-fry fundraiser in Indianola, Iowa Sunday.
“I have great respect for everyone with whom I ran in 2007. If you go back and look at those 13 debates, the only two people who never disagreed on any single, solitary subject in those debates were Barack Obama and Joe Biden,” Biden said in his remarks, stoking speculation that he might make another run for president in 2016.
Biden withdrew from the 2008 Democratic primary after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses. He was later tapped by Obama to be his running mate.
However, Biden repeatedly proved to be a liability during both of Obama’s presidential campaigns.
“How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid,” Obama reportedly told his staff in late October 2008, according to the campaign tell-all “Game Change” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Biden also told reporters during the race that he was more qualified for the presidency than Obama, according to the book.
During the Obama-Biden ticket’s 2012 re-election fight, Biden made a racial faux pas at an August speech in Virginia when he declared, “[Romney] said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks write their own rules — unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” Several hundred African-Americans were in the crowd.
Obama defended Biden in an interview with People magazine, claiming that his loose-lipped running mate was referring to consumers who would end up in chains, not black people.
“In no sense was he trying to connote something other than that,” Obama said.
“It’s not a big issue to the American people. It’s a big issue to the press,” Obama said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight while his wife Michelle tried to change the subject.
Biden, whose 2016 candidacy against presumptive front-runner Hillary Clinton would probably see a groundswell of Republican support, already has two losing presidential campaigns under his belt, having first dropped out of the 1988 Democratic primary following a health scare and accusations that he plagiarized part of a speech from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.
Clinton’s presumptive 2016 candidacy already has multiple super PACs in its corner and appears to be seen as Obama-world’s best bet for maintaining the White House. As The Daily Caller reported, founding Finance Council members for the “Ready for Hillary” PAC include top contributors to the pro-Obama 2012 super PAC Priorities USA and Susie Tompkins Buell, a member of the progressive donor network “The Democracy Alliance,” which helped secure Obama’s re-election.