NY TIMES
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his associates have begun to actively explore a possible presidential campaign, which would upend the Democratic field and deliver a direct threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton, several people who have spoken to Mr. Biden or his closest advisers say.
Mr. Biden’s advisers have started to reach out to Democratic leaders and donors who have not yet committed to Mrs. Clinton or who have grown concerned about what they see as her increasingly visible vulnerabilities as a candidate.
The conversations, often fielded by Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, have taken place through hushed phone calls and quiet lunches. In most cases, they have grown out of an outpouring of sympathy for Mr. Biden since the death of his son Beau, 46, in May.
One longtime Biden supporter said the vice president had been deeply moved by his son’s desire for him to run.
“He was so close to Beau and it was so heartbreaking that, frankly, I thought initially he wouldn’t have the heart,” the supporter, Michael Thornton, a Boston lawyer, said in an interview. “But I’ve had indications that maybe he does want to — and ‘that’s what Beau would have wanted me to do.’ ”
Mr. Biden’s other son, Hunter, also encouraged him to run,
Mr. Biden’s path, should he run, would not be easy. Mrs. Clinton has enormous support among Democrats inspired by the idea of electing a woman as president, and her campaign has already raised millions of dollars.
Additionally, Mr. Biden, who is 72, has in the past proved to be prone to embarrassing gaffes on the campaign trail. He would also face the critical task of building a field operation.
The support Mr. Biden has garnered speaks to growing concerns among Democrats that Mrs. Clinton could lose in Iowa and New Hampshire, as the populist message of one of her opponents, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, draws swelling crowds.
“The reality is it’s going to be a tough, even-steven kind of race, and there’s that moment when a lot of party establishment would start exactly this kind of rumble: ‘Is there anybody else?’ ” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist.
At the same time, the slow trickle of news about Mrs. Clinton’s use of private email when she was secretary of state, and the coming Benghazi hearings, may be distracting some voters from the core message of her campaign: the need to lift the middle class.
“It’s not that we dislike Hillary, it’s that we want to win the White House,” said Richard A. Harpootlian, a lawyer and Democratic donor in Columbia, S.C., who met with Mr. Ricchetti before Beau Biden died. “We have a better chance of doing that with somebody who is not going to have all the distractions of a Clinton campaign.”
In a July 30 Quinnipiac poll, 57 percent of voters said Mrs. Clinton was not honest and trustworthy, and 52 percent said she did not care about their needs or problems. The same poll showed Mr. Biden with his highest favorability rating, 49 percent, in seven years, with 58 percent saying he was honest and trustworthy and 57 percent saying he cared about them. But Mrs. Clinton’s numbers are still strong, especially among likely Democratic primary voters.
Mr. Biden is by no means a virtuoso campaigner. Mr. Biden’s first campaign in 1988 ended in heartbreak after news reports that he plagiarized parts of a speech and exaggerated his academic record forced him to drop out. In 2008, he drew less than 1 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and dropped out after making controversial comments about Barack Obama, then seeking his first term in the White House. Mr. Biden said he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”