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‘Ridin’ With Biden’ in 2016, but So Far the Vice President’s Not Aboard -
NYTimes.com

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‘Ridin’ With Biden’ in 2016, but So Far the Vice President’s Not Aboard

CHICAGO — On the whiteboard at campaign headquarters in a spartan downtown
office are listed the day’s tasks. No. 1: “Send out bumper stickers.”

Those would be the “I’m Ridin’ With Biden” bumper stickers featuring the
vice president of the United States in his signature aviator sunglasses
behind the wheel of a favorite muscle car with a slightly mischievous grin
on his face.

Never mind that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/joseph_r_jr_biden/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
is not for the moment actually running for president. The founders of the
Draft Biden 2016 committee refuse to take probably not for an answer. And
in this spare office with a shuffleboard table but no televisions, a
handful of Democratic activists is trying to build the unlikely nucleus of
an unlikely presidency.

Theirs is not exactly a political juggernaut. During a recruiting trip to a
Democratic event in South Carolina, some who encountered the Draft Biden
movement asked if it was a beer. Mr. Biden has not endorsed the effort, nor
called or visited or publicly acknowledged its existence. The closest the
team of activists has come to the vice president during this campaign
season is the life-size cardboard cutout figure of Mr. Biden in the corner
of their office.

Interactive Feature | Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)? At
least a dozen Republicans and a handful of Democrats have expressed an
interest in running for their party’s 2016 presidential nomination.
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/19/us/elections/100000003482816.mobile.html>

But Will Pierce and his band of Bidenistas argue that the vice president is
the best Democrat to carry on the legacy of President Obama and they are
working overtime to convince him of that. They have collected more than
81,000 petition signatures, sponsored house parties, secured endorsements,
made fund-raising calls, issued news releases and, on Saturday, will
sponsor a rally in Davenport, Iowa, all in the hope of luring the vice
president into the race.

“We’re bringing on more people. We just want to show the vice president the
support he has,” said Mr. Pierce, 27, an Army Reserve captain who served in
Iraq and started the draft committee this spring. “When and if he gets into
the race, he’ll have a foundation. He’ll have some endorsers. He’ll have a
grass-roots organization ready to go.”

The draft committee reflects an undercurrent of discontent in the
Democratic Party with the idea of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton gliding to the nomination. The momentum shown by the long-shot
candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has encouraged those in the
party who want a choice.

“We’re trying to engage Democrats who up until this point have felt
disengaged by a coronation,” said Joseph Schweitzer, 26, who serves as the
Draft Biden committee’s finance director.

Mr. Biden has not ruled out a campaign, but he has given no indication that
he is serious about running either. In recent months, he has been consumed
by family crisis as his elder son, Joseph R. Biden III, known as Beau,
battled brain cancer and died last month.

Since his son’s death, the vice president has spent most of his time with
his family at home in Wilmington, Del., but he has made several forays to
Washington in recent days wearing a simple black rosary with a religious
medal on his wrist. Some who saw him at the White House said he seemed
eager to get back into a work routine.

Some Democrats wonder whether Mr. Biden, 72, who served 36 years in the
Senate and ran for president in 1988 and 2008, might emerge from the
tragedy recommitted to public service and give another look at a third
presidential bid. But several people close to Mr. Biden said they saw no
real chance that he would run absent an unforeseen development taking Mrs.
Clinton out of the race.

Still, unlike Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who
consistently said she was not running despite a draft effort, Mr. Biden has
not definitively said no, instead promising a decision by the end of
summer. As long as he is not telling them to stop, the Democratic activists
here in Chicago figure the door remains open.

Mr. Pierce said the committee got its start in his living room a few months
ago when he sent out an email to 2,000 people arguing for a Biden
presidential bid. He then went to the gym to work out.

“I came back and when I saw my email” there were “all these people who
said, ‘We want to get involved,’” he said. “Since then, it’s just taken
off.”

Like the others on the committee, Mr. Pierce has no strong ties to Mr.
Biden. He did some motorcade advance work for the vice president and his
wife. Most of the 10 or so others who work full-time for the committee —
about half a dozen are paid — have worked on Democratic campaigns, usually
in field work or fund-raising. Ahmed Khan, 31, the communications director,
ran unsuccessfully for Chicago alderman and worked for three successive
challengers to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

But none of them served in senior positions with the Obama-Biden team, and
only a few have met Mr. Biden in passing once or twice at events. Mr.
Biden’s advisers said they learned about the draft committee only when it
announced its formation.

The activists hope to collect 500,000 petition signatures by the end of
summer and have been raising money, although they will not say how much
until the next required reporting period. (“We haven’t found our
billionaire yet,” Mr. Schweitzer allowed.) Their focus has been on
enlisting supporters from Mr. Biden’s past campaigns.

They showed up one day a couple months ago in the office of Roxanna Moritz,
the elected auditor of Scott County, Iowa’s third most populous county, and
won her support. “I love the fact that Biden tells it like it is,” she said
by telephone from Davenport, the county seat. “I don’t believe you have to
be charismatic and do the fluff. I really want to know how that person
feels. And while he’s sometimes too blunt, I know it’s coming from his
heart and his mind. I like that about him.”

Mr. Biden is way behind Mrs. Clinton in any theoretical matchups and few
independent analysts see him as a serious threat. But he does have a
reservoir of good will among Democrats. A New York Times/CBS News survey in
early May found that 53 percent of registered Democratic voters would
consider voting for Mr. Biden versus 85 percent who would consider voting
for Mrs. Clinton.

“As soon as he were to hint or even drop a line to anybody that had a say,
I think that poll number would go far up and we wouldn’t have a problem
about viability or electability,” Mr. Khan said.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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