What Joe Biden’s previous presidential campaigns can tell us about how he’ll make his big decision this year

Vice President Joe Biden, left, talks with Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., his longtime confidant and aide, in the U.S. Capitol in 2010. (Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call via Getty Images)

Vice President Joe Biden is expected to reveal in the coming weeks whether he’ll make a third bid for the presidency, closing out the last big, open question about the makeup of the 2016 presidential field and ending what has become the speculative political parlor game of the summer.

As people try to understand what Biden might be thinking, it’s worth taking a look at how he approached his previous bids for presidency in 1988 (when he pulled out of the race amid a plagiarism controversy before voting began) and 2008 (when he dropped out after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucuses).

One of the most instructive texts on this front is an oral history conducted by the U.S. Senate’s historian in 2011 with Biden’s longtime confidant and top aide, former U.S. Sen. Ted Kaufman. Kaufman spent decades as Biden’s chief of staff, then briefly filled his boss’s Delaware Senate seat in 2009 when Biden left for the White House.

Kaufman’s extensive and multipart talk with Don Ritchie, now historian emeritus of the Senate, covered several key topics about Biden’s political life, including an entire interview titled “Biden for President.”

While some things have obviously changed since Biden’s earlier races for the White House — age, experience, the emergence and evolution of the Internet — other important things have remained constant: Biden’s tight inner circle, his family-first nature and his pragmatic approach to politics. With that in mind, Yahoo News culled the lengthy on-the-record interview with Kaufman, who declined to comment beyond his previous accounts, to find nuggets that might reveal a little bit about how the vice president has previously weighed presidential decisions and is approaching the last big political choice of his elected career.

For Biden, family set the terms for how and when to enter the presidential race:

“Basically after the ’84 election we started preparing for a presidential election. Essentially what was done was there was a decision made. The first decision always was personal and family with Joe Biden, and by the way I think it’s underrated in terms of all politicians, there’s a number of misperceptions out there with the public, just like I’m sure it is in trying to understand baseball players or understand academics, but when you’re inside you realize that what drives most politicians’ decision is personal. How does it affect my family? If my family’s not going to be onboard for this campaign, I’m not running. … It’s a practical and a personal problem. You will probably fail, if you run without having your family squared away — we can go back through history and look at people who had done that, or tried to do that. So the first decision was: was the family ready to do this.”

Biden thought years of advance planning made for a better White House bid:

“I think we knew better than most people what was required. We knew that for this incredibly complex enterprise, getting started early was essential. You could run at the end, like Gore ran at the end in ’88 and did very well, so you don’t have to but it really was better to do it over the long pull. So we started in ’84 in terms of national scheduling.”

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Kaufman speaks at a 2009 event with his former boss and friend, Biden, about choosing a Supreme Court nominee with a background in politics. (Photo: AP Photo/Rob Carr)

The 2008 election’s focus on foreign policy helped push Biden into the race:

“Now, what turns out to be the big issue, which I did not put high up on my chart in 1987, but which I would put at the top of the chart now, is very simple: it depends on whether the issues are domestic issues or foreign policy issues. Clearly, in 2008 the senators were all drawn to the race because of the foreign policy concerns, the war on terrorism and all that. I think the reason why governors weren’t running in 2008 was because the electorate was very concerned about foreign policy. For instance, take Mark Warner, who is very attractive. I consider him a friend, and I hold him in the highest regard. He was governor of Virginia. In a normal year, like this year [2011], in this campaign he’d be an ideal candidate for president. But he found that wherever he went he was getting very detailed questions on foreign policy. I think that — he even said at the time he dropped out that he felt that national security was an area that he did not have enough expertise on. So I think that’s really what happened.”

A tight-knit group of family and allies — an “executive committee” — convened to guide the campaign:

“My title in the ’88 campaign was chief of staff and treasurer. I had two functions, one was there was to be on a committee of people, family and others, who sat down on a regular basis and talked about what we should be doing, like an executive committee, and I was on that. It wasn’t called an executive committee, but I was involved in all the meetings to figure out what we’d do next.”

On the personal, bruising nature of campaigns (and why that might dissuade a currently popular vice president from putting himself through the ringer again):

“I can remember Bill Bradley calling Joe Biden when his name was being mentioned for president, this was while he was still in the Senate. He said to Joe Biden, “Joe, I don’t know what’s going on. No one has ever questioned my integrity before, and here I am, my name has been mentioned and they’re questioning my integrity.” Joe said, “Welcome to the club. This is it.” The example I always use is Bob Dole, because Bob Dole had an incredible sense of humor, a very funny man, but more important, Bob Dole had more character in his little finger than most people have in their whole body. Bob Dole, if you read Richard Ben Cramer’s book, ‘What It Takes,’ he went though Dole’s being wounded, almost dying in Italy, the incredible rehab he had to go through. This is a guy who has demonstrated character. I put Joe Biden in this class, but Dole had so much character, and integrity, and humor, and the rest of it, but by the end of the campaign he was a laughing stock. People joked about Bob Dole as a presidential candidate (of course, afterwards he did the Viagra ads, and that didn’t help). But I said if you can take someone like Bob Dole and turn him into someone who is a buffoon and a joke, it just shows you where presidential politics are. But that’s what they’re looking for in presidential politics.”

On Biden’s family pulling the plug on his 1988 campaign and the sense that there would be time for him to be president later in life:

“We had a meeting in Wilmington of the family and a few advisors. I compared his position to that of Winston Churchill who had to resign after the incredible losses in the Dardanelles, and then he came back to be Prime Minister, and suggested it was best to get out now and Biden was young enough to come back later.”

Of course, Biden is 72 now and that “come back later” window is closing fast, if not already shut. The only remaining question — and one only he knows the answer to — is whether he and his family think this is his moment to finally win what has twice eluded him, or whether it’s time to say goodbye to the dream and walk away.