Presidential race benefits if Joe Biden seeks election

Joe Biden ought to run for President, and not just because his son has died and because he stood for 10 hours the other day and greeted the people who came to pay their last respects to Beau Biden, and also to his father. He ought to run because he would bring so much life and so much character to the Democratic campaign, and put a charge into the Clintons. Joe Biden would bring his immense humanity as well.

He got to St. Anthony of Padua Church in Wilmington, Del.,

around 1 o’clock in the afternoon on Friday and stayed there until around 11 o’clock. All day and all night the lines kept moving and the people kept coming, and once and for all you saw what the country thought of Joe Biden, who is so much more than some kind of second banana to Barack Obama.

Maybe he doesn’t have the energy at 72 to do it, even though he is just five years older than Hillary Clinton. Maybe all the loss he has known in his years in public life, the loss of his first wife and a daughter and now the death of Beau Biden, has taken too much out of him, literally and figuratively taken the heart out of him. Maybe he doesn’t have the money to take on the Clintons, who sometimes remind you of the Underwoods of “House of Cards.”

But the whole process would be better and his party would be better for it if he ran, if out of the tragedy of the loss of his son, a boy who was nearly killed in the automobile accident that took his mother and his sister, comes one last great run for Beau Biden’s father, whether he can beat Hillary Clinton or not.

“Look at all the people you saw in those lines,” a friend of Biden’s, one who spent over an hour in one of those lines himself on Friday, said Sunday. “You’re not going to see a more representative example of what this country is really about.”

When Rich Schapiro of the Daily News, when he finally made it to the front of the church, asked the vice president how he’d had the strength to stand there the way he had for hour after hour, Joe Biden said, “It’s what Beau would have done.”

So Joe Biden stood in front of the altar, near the flag-draped coffin of his son, and did not leave the church for good until he had greeted the last person in the line. This wasn’t just about his Catholic faith on this day. There was something as wonderfully American in the strength that Biden showed you as the people who kept patiently moving to the front of St. Anthony of Padua.

You can say that Joe Biden is too old to make one last run. You can say that Biden, who came out of Scranton, Pa., and got elected to the U.S. Senate back in 1972 and finally ran with Obama, is too proud a man to lose to a Clinton, or lose to both of them, which is the reality of a long campaign that is just beginning. After all the winning he has done in his career, first in Delaware, then with Obama, he doesn’t want to go out looking like some kind of loser.

But the minute he announced, he would be as good as anybody running for President this time, in either party, and far better than most of them.

And there should be a part of Biden that shouldn’t want Hillary Clinton to run as if she’s the sitting vice president, even if Obama went out of his way to make her look that way when she was on her way out the door at the State Department. The fact is, and everybody in Obama’s White House knows it, Joe Biden has a far greater grasp of foreign policy than she ever did, no matter how hard people try to turn her into John Foster Dulles.

Obama gave a lovely eulogy for Beau Biden the other day, he did, but then speeches have always been the best of it for him, bright work for him even in the darkest times. At one point, the President said this about his vice president, looking right at him:

“Joe, you are my brother, and I am grateful every day you have got such a big heart, and a big soul, and those broad shoulders. I could not admire you more.”

He ought to admire him, even in this time in America when people have too often missed the point on Biden’s humanity and his character and the story he has to tell and treated him like the Obama administration’s crazy uncle. But he is so much more than that. He ought to run for President, to honor the constituency he saw with his eyes last weekend, the America in those lines at St. Anthony of Padua.