Biden might delay White House campaign decision

WASHINGTON – Some longtime friends of Joe Biden and other Democratic donors, including some who’ve been supporting Hillary Clinton, are preparing for the possibility the vice president may delay announcing whether he’ll run for president past an end-of-September timeline he and his advisers were targeting.

Biden and his advisers initially signaled that he’d decide by the end of this month, and an independent Draft Biden group has been building its fundraising and organizational strategy with that timeline in mind. His travels this past week, his first overtly political trip since late-summer rumors began heating up about a possible Biden entry into the race, sent mixed signals. On the one hand it had many of the trappings of a campaign trip, putting Biden in front of key constituencies, but on the other he did not take advantage of obvious opportunities for meetings with donors on his own behalf.

And in an Atlanta synagogue this week where he talked publicly for the first time about his decision-making process, Biden acknowledged that he’s considering the race but also hinted that he might miss his own informal deadline. Talking about how grief over the recent death of his son, Beau Biden, from brain cancer has affected his thinking, Biden told his audience that past experience with family loss has taught him “there’s no way to put a timetable on it.”

“I don’t know that there’s a magic to Oct. 1; I’m suggesting there not need be,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who founded the Atlanta synagogue lecture series that hosted Biden. A friend of Biden’s since the 1970s who has served in the Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, he was struck by Biden’s refusal to put a deadline on his deliberations. “What I heard is, he’s not ready to make a decision now and that he’s not willing to put a timetable on it,” said Eizenstat, who has been supporting and raising money for Clinton this year. He said doesn’t know what Biden will do.

Shifting dynamics in the Democratic nominating contest are making Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders a tougher rival to Hillary Clinton in Iowa than previously imagined. That may give Biden more time and space to cultivate donors and organize as a more mainstream alternative.

And campaign laws allowing more outside money from big donors, and an unpredictable Republican nominating contest in which billionaire Donald Trump and neurosurgeon Ben Carson are flummoxing establishment favorites, may signal an unconventional election year for both parties, in which the usual rules about timelines don’t apply.