Former Vice President Joe Biden’s advisers are reportedly asking him to consider pledging to just serve one term in office if he wins his party’s nomination and faces off against President Donald Trump in the general election.
According to a Thursday New York Times report, Biden’s advisers are discussing “a possible pledge to serve only one term” and framing Biden’s 2020 campaign “as a one-time rescue mission for a beleaguered country.”
Biden is reportedly “uneasy with the prospect of pledging up front not to seek re-election,” though, “believing that it would make him a lame-duck president before he even takes office and cripple his ability to get anything done.”
His advisers are reportedly also asking him to consider announcing failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as his running mate when he announces his candidacy. But the Times notes that, by doing so, “Biden could appear presumptuous — even imperious — by choosing a running mate before the electorate has the chance to sift the field of candidates.”
A one-term pledge would highlight the fact that Biden would turn 80 in the White House. But in a poll of millennials organized by Chicago’s GenForward survey project that was released this week, Biden actually led “in all surveyed voting blocks–except for millennial Latinos.”
The poll found Biden, with 21 percent support among millennial voters, three percentage points ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Biden, who can be tedious on the stump with his long-winded and never-ending speeches, also led among young minority voters who were not born while Biden was calling school busing “racist” in the 1970s and do not remember the criticism he got from left-wing activists for not having Anita Hill’s back as much as they had hoped he would during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991.
In the poll of millennials, Biden received “29 percent of Asian American millennials, 28 percent of African American millennials and 19 percent of millennial whites,” while Sanders led among young Latinos between the ages of 18-34 with 26 percent support.
In addition, as Gallup has noted, Biden has established himself as the clear national frontrunner and would enter the race at the head of the pack. Biden led the most recent CNN/Des Moines Register Iowa poll in addition to the most recent Monmouth national poll.
Announcing Abrams as his running mate would also pose risks to Biden and Abrams. It would remind black voters of Biden’s questionable record on social justice issues, his support for the infamous Crime Bill, and treatment of Hill when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee during Thomas’s confirmation hearings. In addition, it would also force Abrams, one of the party’s brightest rising stars, to defend someone who held positions and beliefs that went against everything Abrams has been fighting against as an activist.
If Biden enters the race, he will be asked about a 1975 interview that the Washington Post recently unearthed in which Biden told the paper that he thought school busing policies were “racist.”
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with,” Biden said in that interview. “What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
In an election cycle in which black voters are demanding that Democrats talk about reparations for the descendants of slaves, Biden will also have to explain why he believed then that he did “not buy the concept” that “in order to even the score, we must now give the black man a heads start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.”
“I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation,” Biden said in that interview. “And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”
Though Biden is reportedly “95%” sure that he will run for president, he is also reportedly “uneasy” about the “potential attacks on his son Hunter, who was a subject of Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Secret Empires, which highlighted the ‘new corruption’ associated with the Bidens.”
In Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Schweizer revealed that in 2013 “Hunter Biden’s firm signed a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China just 10 days after Joe and Hunter Biden flew to China aboard Air Force Two.”
Still, all signs indicate that Biden is likely to run for president for a third time and formally announce his candidacy in April. Last week, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Biden: “Why wouldn’t you run Mr. Vice President?”
Biden responded: “I can’t think of any reason.”