Former VP Biden joins crowded Democratic presidential field

He’s running.

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday entered the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, after months of will-he-or-won’t-he speculation.

“The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America — America — is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States,” Biden said in a video posted just after 6 a.m.

A 2020 presidential bid has hung over Biden since he opted out of the 2016 primary race, won by former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton. Since Clinton’s upset loss to Republican opponent Donald Trump, Biden has grown in esteem among many Democrats, who contend he could have better appealed to the white working-class and rural voters who helped decide that election.

Biden in his announcement video took direct aim at Trump over the president’s response to the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally Charlottesville, Va. The gathering of neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists and others was ostensibly to protest removal of Conferederate monuments. But amid rising tensions, about a half-mile from the rally site, a protester against the hate groups, Heather Heyer, was killed. Self-identified white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. pleaded guilty to 29 federal crimes in exchange for federal prosecutors’ agreement not to seek the death penalty.

Trump “said ‘there were some very fine people on both sides,'” Biden said in his launch video. “With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalency between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was like any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

The loquacious former senator from Delaware, making his third presidential bid, joins the fray with the highest name recognition in the field. But his relative late entry, at least by 2019 standards, means rival Democratic candidates have been able to nip at his heels to some effect, polls show.

Biden served 36 years in the Senate before becoming President Barack Obama’s vice president, in 2009. Behind the scenes he has agonized about another presidential bid.

Biden’s entry into the 2020 race is the latest in a decadeslong quest for the White House. Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir that he pondered a presidential run as far back as 1980, when Democratic party heavyweights begged the rising star to join the primary fight raging between President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Mass., who challenged the incumbent from the left.

Biden didn’t jump in, and passed up a 1984 presidential bid. But he did run in the 1988 cycle. However, his campaign imploded in September 1987 amid plag
iarism charges and Biden dropped out. Biden considered several more presidential bids, and finally ran again in 2008. By that time, though, he had been eclipsed by national Democratic figures like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — the latter choosing him as his running mate.

The 76-year-old is one of the oldest in the field, just a year younger than independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and decades older than one of the field’s fastest rising stars, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, is 37.

Republicans on Thursday wasted no time trying to take down the 2020 Biden candidacy early.

“Joe Biden has been running for president and losing since the ‘80s. 2020 won’t be any different. Biden’s fingerprints are all over foreign policy blunders and the weakest economic recovery since World War II,” said Republican National Committee Communications Director Michael Ahrens. “We don’t need eight more years of Biden. Just ask President Obama, who isn’t even endorsing his right-hand man.”

Biden started his political career by winning a seat on the New Castle, Del., city council in 1970. Two years later he entered a long-shot race against a seeming Delaware political titan, Sen. Caleb Boggs, who previously served as governor and a congressman. But Biden won in one of the biggest political upsets of the area, and turned 30 — the minimum age for Senate service — weeks before his first term on Capitol Hill was set to begin.

Tragedy soon struck, though. His wife and his one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a late 1972 car accident, in which his sons, Beau and Hunter, survived. Biden remarried late in his first Senate term, by which time he had earned renown as a public speaker and advocate for — mostly — liberal causes.

Throughout Biden’s political career he’s displayed a gift of gab, frequently delivering lengthy Senate floor speeches and stemwinder campaign orations. Some of his humor has fallen flat, at times drawing stern looks from his then-boss, President Obama, and his habit of casually touching women in public has drawn raised eyebrows. But with his mostly liberal voting record over decades on Capitol Hill, feminist and minority groups have largely overlooked his gaffes.

But his occasional deviations from liberal orthodoxy long could yet draw scrutiny from the ascendant left in the Democratic coalition. Positions he took that were commonplace earlier in his career may now look different in the age of intersectionality and #MeToo.

And while Biden won enormous public sympathy for his graceful handling of his wife and daughter’s death in 1972, just as he was entering the national spotlight, other family issues of more recent vintage have raised eyebrows. Biden sat out the 2016 presidential race after his son Beau, attorney general of Delaware, died of cancer at age 46. But son Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve, where he had been a public affairs officer, after testing positive for cocaine. Hunter also made headlines for his relationship with his brother’s widow Hallie Biden, which came to light during his divorce.

[Read more: McCain family to support Biden in 2020 race in bid to defeat Trump]