Joe Biden: His decision not to run for the presidency in 2016 marks the end of a political era

Out of America: Popular with friends and foes alike, his tactile, what-you-see-is-what-you-get style has been a perfect foil for the aloof President Obama

Publicly, grief for his son ended Joe Biden’s White House ambitions, but the resurgence of Hillary Clinton must also have been a factor (Reuters)

We’ll miss you, Joe. Sure, he’s still going to be Vice-President for another 15 months. But Joe Biden’s announcement last week that he won’t be running for the top job in 2016 brings down the curtain on a political career the likes of which America may not see again.

In a way, he was the last of the old school. There’s a black man in the White House, and a woman is the bookies’ favourite to succeed him. The Republican field is led by a real-estate showman and a retired neuro-surgeon; a couple of young Cuban-American Senators are among their closest pursuers. Biden has come a long way, to be sure. But deep down he’s an old rust-belt Catholic, of the pragmatic working stock that symbolised the United States before the IT era, before out-sourcing, and before the Congress where he served for 36 years became a shambles.

He’d take the train from Washington DC to his home in Delaware on weekends. He never made much money. Last year his net worth was estimated at around $500,000 (£330,000), chickenfeed compared to most of his colleagues in the millionaires’ club that is the US Senate – not to mention the Clintons and their $250,000-a-pop speaking fees. Biden’s a political lifer, who loves campaigning. And if he talks too much and puts his foot in it sometimes, who cares any more?

When I arrived in Washington in 1991 he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and establishing world records in garrulity. As Biden embarked on a statement, you quickly learned to turn off the TV. Switch it on 10 minutes later, and he’d still be stuck in a verbal loop tape. It was the same later, when he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. Only when he made his second bid for the White House in 2008 did he cure the habit. Could he be succinct he was asked – I seem to remember – in a candidates’ debate. “Yes,” came the answer, followed by a brief but deafening silence, then gales of laughter.

The gaffes though have persisted. “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30 per cent chance we’re going to get it wrong,” he said of the contentious stimulus programme, passed soon after he and Barack Obama took office. Before that, when still a candidate, he described his then opponent and future boss as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy … I mean, that’s a storybook, man”. As for the final passage of Obamacare in 2010, Biden muttered in the President’s ear and injudiciously close to one of those tiresome live mikes, that it was “a big fucking deal”.

At first such verbal incontinence irritated the precise, ever-disciplined Obama. But gradually the two forged a close bond. The vice-presidency was once likened to a “bucket of warm p***” (“spit” in the bowdlerised version) by an earlier incumbent. But all that has changed in recent times, with Walter Mondale, Al Gore and of course Dick Cheney. And now Biden.

The tactile, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Biden has been the perfect foil for the cerebral, and aloof Obama. Biden is this White House’s best link with a Congress that the President plainly despises. Around the building he’s known as “Uncle Joe” (not to be confused with Stalin). He’s been the administration’s most effective spokesman on domestic issues, and his loyalty has been total. It was fitting that when Biden decided he would not run, he made the announcement in the White House Rose Garden, with Obama at his side.

For all his flaws, Biden has been human and “authentic” in an era when politicians seem prisoners of spin-doctors, strategists and pollsters. And the humanity has only been enhanced by the way he has come through two family tragedies: the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident just before Christmas 1972, only six weeks after his first election to the Senate and then, earlier this year, the loss to brain cancer of his eldest son Beau, aged just 46.

Until last week, Biden’s ambition had always been to win the presidency himself. Twice he’s tried and failed miserably – before the first primary votes were cast in 1988, when he was caught plagiarising Neil Kinnock, then in 2008 when he dropped out after a dismal showing in the Iowa caucuses, admittedly in an all-star field that included Hillary Clinton, Obama and the not-yet-disgraced 2004 vice-presidential candidate John Edwards.

Joe Biden is quitting while he’s ahead. A wise decision perhaps, but a sad one for his country

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Clearly he wanted to run this time. But grief at Beau’s death upset every calculation. All summer and beyond, Biden struggled to decide. Finally, he and his family were emotionally ready for the ordeal of a presidential campaign – but by then it was too late.

Such at least was his explanation on Wednesday: a problem not of desire, but of logistics. Two words that never passed his lips were Hillary Clinton, but she too was surely factored into the process. A Biden run made sense only if Clinton was faltering, and badly. For a while, it seemed she was. But a terrific performance in the first Democratic debate turned her fortunes around. The day after he bowed out, she excelled herself again during eight hours of Congressional inquisition by Republicans bent on destroying her. Instead they laid not a glove upon her. Now with Biden’s withdrawal and barring some act of God, her nomination is virtually guaranteed.

Clinton’s gain however is America’s loss. Her talents are many, but she lacks what Biden has: a genuine common touch and the ability to make friends among political foes. She has described Republicans as enemies, and is demonised by them in return. For South Carolina’s Senator Lindsey Graham though, who is currently vying for the Republican nomination, Biden is “the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics”. By avoiding a presidential race he was almost bound to lose, Joe Biden is quitting while he’s ahead. A wise decision perhaps, but a sad one for his country.