Former Secretary of State and failed 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry is reportedly thinking about making another White House run, but he told the New York Times on Tuesday that he is waiting to see if former Vice President Joe Biden will officially enter the 2020 race.
“I want to see what Joe is going to do,” Kerry reportedly told the Times. Kerry reportedly “acknowledged that he had given some consideration to making a 2020 presidential bid of his own.”
Kerry, the former Massachusetts Senator, along with former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), attended the South Carolina funeral of Fritz Hollings, the legendary former Palmetto State Senator.
Biden eulogized Hollings along with Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), the South Carolina kingmaker whose influence is likely to be even more important in the 2020 presidential primary.
Kerry told Harvard’s Institute of Politics last year that he would not be taking a 2020 run off the table even though he was not going to be actively “laying any groundwork.”
“I’ve said I’m not going to eliminate, I’m not taking anything off the table,” Kerry reportedly said at the November event. “But I’m not sitting around — I haven’t been running around to the most obvious states, laying any groundwork or doing anything. Am I going to think about it? Yeah, I’m going to think about it, I’ve said that point blank.”
Even before multiple women came forward and accused Biden of touching them and invading their personal spaces at various campaign events, Biden, who has indicated that he is “95 percent committed to running for president,” was reportedly concerned and “uneasy” about the inevitable “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.”
Biden has not formally announced his candidacy, but the former vice president has led or placed second in nearly every state and national poll.