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Joe Biden In 2016? Not So Crazy (POLITCO)

By Glenn Thrush

Politico<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74335.html>, March 22, 2012

For the past couple of years, Vice President Joe Biden has quietly assembled an A-team of advisers who would, without doubt, be considered the nucleus of a presidential campaign - if only he wouldn't be 73 in 2016.

Biden's age would snuff the last embers of a presidential ambition that led him to a pair of crushing defeats in 1988 and 2008, or so many in Barack Obama's camp thought when they first tapped him. But the old fire crackles yet. And Biden, spurred in part by those rumors about being replaced on the ticket by Hillary Clinton (who turns 69 in '16), is campaigning with a young man's tenacity in 2012 - with an eye toward keeping all of his options open.

Biden has gone on a recent staffing spree - culminating with the hire of Clinton-era operative Steve Ricchetti - that has many Democrats, and even some on Obama's own team, wondering if the preternaturally spry and congenitally upbeat vice president just might confound conventional wisdom.

Former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a Biden friend, staffer and adviser since the early 1970s, said it's "premature" to say Biden is laying the groundwork for a 2016 run but has no doubt that his golf-addicted buddy is physically capable of it.

"What I've been saying, and what I think he believes also, is that after this election is over, he should seriously think about 2016," said Kaufman, who is part of an informal kitchen cabinet that includes Mike Donilon, whom Ricchetti is replacing, and former chief of staff Ron Klain, who's been guiding Biden's moves despite a day job advising ex-AOL impresario Steve Case.

"He's completely consumed with 2012. ... In 2008, his view was, 'Here's a Super Bowl, they need a running back, they need me, I'm just supposed to come in and carry the ball,'" Kaufman added. "This time is a lot different. He's been part of this team for three, four years and he's got relationships with Axe [senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod] and [senior White House adviser David] Plouffe."

Obama aides, by and large, are amused rather than threatened by Biden, although they are none too eager to reprise the veep vs. White House storyline in the "West Wing" TV show or the real-life Bill Clinton-Al Gore drama that inspired it.

But if Biden was picked in part because he posed no threat to the man at the top of the ticket, he's proven his value as Obama's ambassador to white, working-class Middle America and as a surrogate who can throw a political punch without appearing mean-spirited.

He opened the official campaign season last week at a Toledo, Ohio, union hall, calling out Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich by name. And he hits the road for three more, starting with an appearance Friday in battleground Florida to talk up Obama's efforts to help the middle class.

"If I were him, I'd be thinking about running," one Obama staffer said. "It would be stupid not to."