26 Apr 2019 (AP) Joe Biden spent a hot August day at his lakefront Delaware home watching hatred on display in Charlottesville, Virginia, where torch-wielding white supremacists had marched through town. A counter-protester advocating racial equality was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd.
When President Donald Trump blamed the violence on “both sides,” the former vice president says he was stunned.
He turned to his closest advisers — his family — to discuss what to do next.
Spread out across the country, the Bidens quickly convened through a series of group text messages. For months, they’d weighed whether Biden, whose two prior White House campaigns were abject failures, should try again.
There was now consensus: Prepare to run against Trump.
Biden’s sister and longtime political confidante, Valerie Biden Owens, described Trump’s comments as a “blow” to the man who had served as the No. 2 to America’s first black president.
“It really started percolating, and the essence of this was Charlottesville,” Biden Owens said. “I can tell you that was a major motivating moment for my brother, and the entire family.”
“The big ‘yes’ started with this,” said Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime Senate chief of staff.
Nearly two years later, Biden made it official Thursday when he announced in a video that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination again. He blasted Trump’s “moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it” and declared the election a “battle for the soul of this nation.”
Biden is positioning himself as the anti-Trump, an experienced elder statesman ready to restore stability to Washington.
But he faces steep challenges. He’s staking his candidacy on an appeal to the white working-class voters who swung to Trump in 2016, but he must also energize black voters.
At 76, he’s the second oldest contender in the race (behind Bernie Sanders) at a time when many Democratic activists yearn for generational change. He sees his decades in public life as an asset. Others see it as a minefield of views on race and personal behavior that no longer match the modern Democratic Party.
His candidacy will serve as a fresh referendum on the eight years of the Obama administration, which some Democrats are beginning to view more critically.
But none of that dissuaded Biden from running.
This account of how he arrived at his decision is based on interviews with more than a dozen aides, longtime friends, advisers and family members who have discussed his deliberation over the past three years. Some requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about their conversations and observations...
