Joe Biden took months to decide he wouldn’t run for president — but he was sold on Elizabeth Warren as his running mate from the start, people familiar with the situation told POLITICO.
And he still thinks the Massachusetts firebrand would be Hillary Clinton’s best choice to replace him as the nation’s No. 2 in January 2017.
Biden, a stalwart Democrat who has veered leftward in recent years — but, as a centrist senator, voted to scuttle the Glass-Steagall prohibitions on banks engaging in speculative investments — favored Warren because he needed a partner to capture the wave of anti-bank, anti-establishment anger raging to his left.
Warren, a freshman senator from Massachusetts, who supports breaking up the big banks and re-imposing 1930s-era Wall Street regulations to prevent another global financial crisis, was Biden’s “only real choice,” according to an official he spoke to at the time.
Biden — who told an interviewer on Tuesday that he considered running for president because he believed he was “the best” person for the job — took his hat out of the ring in late October 2015, citing the stresses on his family following the death of his son Beau.
But he’s recently told associates that Warren would be an equally smart pick for Hillary Clinton, who has been sharply criticized for refusing to publish the transcripts of her high-paid speeches to the elite banking firm of Goldman Sachs.
Biden, a senior Democratic official said, first mentioned Warren as a possible running mate during his earliest strategy sessions with a team of advisers that included friends Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti and Ted Kaufman; Donilon, the person said, was particularly enthusiastic about it.
And Biden broached the idea, almost matter of factly, to Warren during a much-hyped lunch meeting at the vice president’s residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory last September.
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SOURCE: GLENN THRUSH and ANNIE KARNI
Politico
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