Joe Biden You Don't Have to Do It, Man

Joe Biden, who has been mulling a run for president since the moment his last run for president ended, has still not made up his mind on whether or not he is going to run for president.

Here’s what he said recently about it:

When asked about a potential 2020 run, the former vice president told POLITICO: “I haven’t made up my mind. I will at the beginning of next year. But I don’t know,” he said. Asked how he’s feeling about the possibility, he added: “Well, it’s a family decision.”

First, it’s kinda dumb for Politico to expect any answer other than “maybe” or “no” to this question, given that Biden’s in the middle of a big-ol folksy barn-burner tour of places where people like working-class toughs like him in order to promote Democratic candidates during this midterms. Even though these stump speech tours are widely assumed to be tryouts for the Democrats 2020 field (otherwise why the hell is Cory Booker hanging out in Iowa), Biden’s not going to blow up the news cycle right now. But Politico got their maybe, so, congrats. The follow-up to that maybe that I would have given is “Buddy, wow, listen, you uh… don’t have to do that.”

Joe Biden it is ok to retire, my guy.

There’s a lot of reasons Joe Biden shouldn’t be president, the first of them being this:

But besides the reasons that Joe Biden sucks (the fucked-up legacy of the Anita Hill hearings, many bad votes in the Senate, the chumminess with Mike Pence), he also shouldn’t run for president because there are plenty of other Democrats with better politics and similar likability who would probably do a much, much better job in office. He’s a hardcore centrist Democrat who would probably do just enough to bring the country back to some semblance of normalcy that another reactionary smashes him in four or eight years.

The general rationale for Biden 2020 is this, also per Politico:

The breadth of the former vice president’s travel schedule is a testament to the broad-based appeal he’d bring to the 2020 race, as comfortable landing in Trump country as in a liberal college town like Madison.

People like Joe Biden. That’s fine! It is fine that people like him, because then hopefully they will like whoever he tells them to vote for in 2020. It just doesn’t have to be him! Although, to be fair, if Joe goes for it he’d still be in the running for Michael Avenatti’s endorsement.

Clarification 3:00 a.m. ET: The lede of this piece and one sentence referencing Biden’s age have been updated to exclude language that could be misconstrued as ageist. This was not my intent, and I regret this error.