Biden insiders Feel Clinton STALKING [View all]

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Joe Biden isn’t running for president yet, but Hillary Clinton’s already running against him. Clinton and her aides have their line—the vice president deserves the time and space to decide, they repeat over and over and over—and so far they’ve held off the heavy artillery. Instead, they’re firing warning shots. Tightly targeted warning shots. The hints from the campaign come in heavy: Biden would be to Clinton’s right if he ran, more out of touch with the party’s progressive base. Surrogates have sounded off, questioning his chances and his political abilities, wondering if he’d be up to the job. Clinton even leapt in herself, bringing him up out of nowhere as she spoke to a woman in a diner last week in New Hampshire to knock him for how disappointing he’d been when they were working on the bankruptcy bill in the Senate. That was followed by her campaign chair John Podesta, sprinkling a little of his own shade in front of the pro-Clinton Priorities super PAC in New York—it’s already too late for Biden to mount a real challenge, and he’s not going to decide for a few more weeks on top of that.



They’ve stepped up the roll-out of their endorsements and organization. Their operation is just so massive and well put together, they want Biden and anyone considering supporting him to think, there’s just no space left for him. So sure, take your time, is the message people in and around the campaign seem to be sending—but if you end up at yes, you’re going to get hurt. Saint on the sidelines is far different from actual candidate, they want him to realize, when they and everyone else unleash on him, raking through every gaffe and every vote in 36 years in the Senate, digging through his personal life. In the campaign headquarters and in Clinton's wider orbit, they take care to say how much they like him, how much they respect him, don't want to say a bad word about him. But “Should a man like Joe Biden run?” is going to be a very different question for them than “Should a man like Joe Biden be president?”
They haven’t engaged as much as some around the campaign expected, or as much as some Biden allies (the ones who feel affection for him and feel like he’s being goaded into a run) were hoping, so that he’d be scared off.



Inside the Brooklyn headquarters, this has become a sensitive topic. “Because of the personal tragedy and because he is beloved by the president and because he is beloved by so many staffers on both sides, they are super sensitive to doing anything that even whiffs of attacking him,” said a source close to the Clinton campaign. To Biden and the people he’s talking to most about running, this is proof, they think, of just how much of a scare they’ve put into Clinton. On top of what’s public, they say they think the spate of stories a few weeks ago digging into his record on bankruptcy and the Crime Bill came, if not straight from the headquarters in Brooklyn, from people just far enough removed to give them plausible deniability. “This is not a surprise,” said one person familiar with Biden’s thinking. “I think it’s pretty clear that they’re concerned about it.”


http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/joe-biden-hillary-clinton-2016-213911