Poll: One In Four Democrats Have Joe Biden As Their First Choice For President

Townhall.com:

This week, Politico reported that Team Clinton is quietly urging the vice president not to run. The big guns haven’t been drawn yet, but the news publication noted that the mantra for the Clinton camp on Biden is “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.”

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.
[…]

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.”

The Hill  reported last week that Clinton used Biden to as a shield to explain her vote for a bankruptcy bill that liberals opposed in 2001, saying his support partially influenced her “aye” vote in the Senate. And, of course, Politico added that Team Clinton has no anti-Biden strategy formulated, nor have any of their past actions been utilized to dissuade the vice president from running. This was all planned in the beginning.

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