Does Joe Biden even want to be running for president? It sure seems like the answer is no, according to a New York Times story published on Sunday. As someone who stopped taking piano lessons at the age of nine because I was both terrible at it and also hated it, I’m here to tell Joe that you don’t have to do things that you don’t want to do. It’s okay to quit, dude!
When asked, “How badly do you want to be president?” at a recent campaign event in Iowa, Biden reportedly was a bit stumped:
“I think it’s really, really, really important that Donald Trump not be re-elected,” Mr. Biden said, more of a rationale than answer. He then launched into a classic Biden roller derby of verbiage in which he listed all the reasons he found Mr. Trump so distasteful. He landed on a question to himself.
“Could I die happily not having heard ‘Hail to the Chief’ play for me?” the Democratic front-runner asked. “Yeah, I could,” he said. “That’s not why I’m running.”
“I hadn’t planned on running again,” he added. As for actually winning and being president, he had this to say: “The longer I’ve been around, the less that appeals to me. I’ve watched up close and personal what eight years in the White House is like.”
But Biden continues to believe that he is uniquely qualified to beat Donald Trump, despite several polls that show all of the top five Democratic presidential candidates defeating Trump in the general election and despite being a very bad candidate who has lost every single presidential primary he’s ever run in. But Biden, according to his friends, is a martyr who is mounting a third presidential run to save our nation and take us back to a time when Democrats could work congenially with Republicans (ha!).
More, from the Times:
Friends of Mr. Biden suggest that he decided to run for president in large part because he could not have lived with himself if he did not. “Joe has this thing called the ‘Look in the Mirror’ test,” said Ted Kaufman, Mr. Biden’s longtime chief of staff who served out Mr. Biden’s term in the Senate after he became vice president in 2009. “Clearly he has the best chance of beating Trump. And if he did not run this time and Trump won, then what would he think of himself when he looked in the mirror?”
…
It is not hard to whiff a heavy scent of obligation around Team Biden, as if they were positioning him as a kind of Democratic savior. “We didn’t really intend to be going on this journey,” Jill Biden said at a fund-raiser in Sun Valley, Idaho, this summer. “But when it came down to it, too many people were saying, ‘Joe has to run,’ ‘Joe has to run.’”
Joe, you don’t have to run!