Biden details plans for scrapped 2016 campaign in new memoir
Joe Biden is revealing what his presidential campaign might have looked like had he decided to run.
In his new memoir, “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose,” the former vice president details how he had kept himself busy while coping with his son Beau’s cancer diagnosis by charting the course for a possible campaign, NBC News reported.
Biden writes in the book that his campaign “was going to go big. Because frankly, at this point in my career and after all my family had been through, anything less just wasn’t worth it.”
“So many of the presidential campaigns that summer seemed locked in the past. A fight over what happened, what went wrong, what America lost. If I ran, I wanted to paint a picture of America’s future, what we could become, how everyone could be dealt back into the deal."
According to NBC News, Biden wrote that his aides told him the campaign would focus on middle class Americans and that one adviser’s analysis “showed that there was nobody in the field in either party who was more closely identified with the middle class than I was.”
Biden put his presidential ambitions on hold as Beau’s prognosis worsened, and as he recovered from his eldest son’s death.
But months later, the then-vice president started getting phone calls from top Democrats to try and get him to run.
By October 2015, “only one thing could stop me now, and that was me,” he wrote, according to NBC News. He planned a campaign that would take on Wall Street, offer infrastructure plans and try to end cancer.
Still, Biden said he was thrown by a Politico story that suggested Biden was using his son’s death for political gain, writing that it “exceeded even my worst expectations of what the opposition was going to be like.”
And he eventually decided that it was too late and he wasn’t ready to launch a presidential campaign.
“I knew I’d made the right decision when I walked into the Rose Garden with Jill on one side and Barack on the other,” Biden wrote.
Speculation over whether Biden would run for president in 2020 has risen over the months, and Politico reported Friday that he is leaning toward launching a campaign.