Joe Biden reveals how close he came to announcing 2016 presidential campaign in new book

Former Vice President Joe Biden has repeatedly left the door open to a run at the presidency in 2020 – but his new book reveals how close he came to starting a campaign for the 2016 election.

In late 2015, Mr Biden reveals in Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, he was editing an announcement speech for his campaign. The idea of the launch was that Mr Biden would make a big push for the White House.

“A cautious, trim-around-the-edges campaign was pointless. So Biden for President 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,” he writes.

“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,” Mr Biden adds.

It is that difference between the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that Mr Biden makes clear – and it may again become the basis for the 2020 presidential campaign.

After Hillary Clinton visited him to tell him she was running and to ask whether he was too, Mr Biden writes: “She did not evince much joy at the prospect of running… I may have misread her entirely that morning, but she seemed to me like a person propelled by forces not entirely of her own making.”

He has repeatedly made his feelings clear about Mr Trump, telling Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Monday night, as part of a tour to promote the book, that despite initially being prepared to give Mr Trump a chance, Mr Biden now believes he will go down as the “the single exception in American history”.

As for his own run, his team – including his son Beau – had started putting together a campaign memo and in February 2015 they sat down with Mr Biden to discuss the 22-page collection that his chief political strategist Mike Donlion had written. It laid out that the 2016 election was Mr Biden’s to lose, he could connect with middle-class voters like nobody else and he provided a dose of the “real” that the electorate sought.

As Mr Biden writes: “My reputation as a ‘gaffe machine’ was no longer looking like a weakness”.

However, it was the health of Beau that would provide the circumstances which would mean that running for president would not become a reality. As the title suggests, the entire book is a real-time account of Mr Biden, Beau and his family grappling with Beau’s life with brain cancer before his death in May 2015, while Mr Biden also dealt with the challenges of being Vice President. The book spans 260 pages – a snapshot of those years rather than telling Mr Biden’s whole political career.

One of the widely trailed elements of the book is Beau asking his father to run, but Mr Biden makes clear that grief over a son who “had all the best of me” left him with little option.

He recalls a moment in Colorado that summer where he was due to speak at a pair of Democratic fundraisers and someone called out to him that the had served with Beau in the military.

“I felt a lump rise in my throat,” Mr Biden writes. “My breathing suddenly became shallower and my voice cracked. I was afraid I would be overwhelmed by emotion… I waved and hustled over to the car.”

”This was no way for a presidential candidate to act in public,” he adds.

But it was an October media story suggesting that Mr Biden was playing on Beau’s death for potential political gain that “really threw me”, Mr Biden writes.

In the weeks that followed, even Mr Donilon sensed that Biden was not ready personally for the campaign. A final decision was made on 20 October and announced the following day at the White House. “I knew I’d made the right decision when I walked into the Rose Garden,” he writes.

Despite his caginess about laying out plans for 2020, Mr Biden may yet decide that the opposite decision will become the right one.