.. Biden’s appeal for 2020 is that he comes across as a warm, blue-collar, touchy-feely paternal figure, sometimes talking too much, sometimes saying the wrong thing, like calling parts of Asia “the Orient.” At 76, he’s been through it all, and then some.
.. But as he prepares to present himself as a seasoned patriarch who can lead the country in a smooth, classy way, unlike the current occupant of the Oval, he must grapple with the painful reality of his life as the head of a family that has messily spilled into the tabloids, a brood that is still brooding and suffering the reverberations of 46-year-old Beau Biden’s death from brain cancer in 2015.
.. Grief aside, Barack Obama and his coterie of top aides did not think the vice president was the right person to protect and extend the Obama legacy.
But there was a school of thought that, given the monumental effort it took to dismantle the Clinton machine, it would be better to move on from Hillary. Some Biden allies felt that his powerful story of rising above personal loss — his first wife and infant daughter died in a car crash just before Christmas in 1972 —could be a superpower to connect with suffering Americans and that such a raw quest would be good therapy for him.
But Obama felt differently. He could make it up to Hillary and feminist activists for hopscotching over the New York senator who might have blown out the glass ceiling in 2008.
Also, Obama and his strategists thought Biden had hit his ceiling, had his day, had too many gaffes. Hillary, Obama thought, was an impressive and loyal cabinet member who was great in meetings.