Vice President Biden has just announced he will not run for President in 2016.

Vice President Joe Biden ended months of intense speculation about his political future on Wednesday by announcing he wouldn’t seek the presidency, abandoning a dream he’s harbored for decades and putting Hillary Clinton in a stronger position to capture the Democratic nomination.

With President Barack Obama at his side in the White House Rose Garden, Biden said the window for a presidential campaign “has closed.”

The question of whether Biden, 72, would enter the race has consumed Democrats for months. His announcement follows a period of deep — and public — soul searching about whether to run for the White House while grappling with profound personal grief after his son, Beau, died this summer from brain cancer.

The prospect of a run seemed to decline further after Clinton’s commanding performance at the first Democratic presidential debate on October 13. Her poised demeanor and deft handling of tough questions left many analysts convinced that Clinton effectively froze Biden out of the race.

His decision means that barring unexpected developments, Biden’s long political career, which includes nearly 40 years in the Senate and two terms as vice president, will end along with the Obama administration on January 20, 2017.

The task of coming from behind in a campaign that his potential rivals Clinton and Bernie Sanders had already been waging for months seems to have been too steep for Biden.

Had he jumped into the race — in a move that would have been seen as a direct challenge to Clinton — Biden would have faced a huge deficit in grassroots organization and fundraising dollars.

He did not appear to have a genuine route to the nomination, trailing Clinton and Sanders in every national polls. Biden trailed Clinton by more than 20 points in a CNN/ORC poll released Monday. He stood at 18% compared to Clinton’s 45% and Sanders’ 29%.

Biden’s decision will come as a relief to the Clinton campaign, as the former secretary of state seeks to stabilize her White House push after months on the defensive over the email storm about which she will testify before Congress on Thursday.

It means that the Democratic nomination now comes down to a straight fight between Clinton and Sanders, assuming low-polling candidates such as former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley do not catch fire.

And it spares Obama the awkward prospect of watching his vice president and former secretary of state battle to succeed him.

Los Angeles Times:

“As my family and I have worked through the grieving process” after the death of his son, Beau, this summer, “I said all along” that the window for a presidential run might close before they were ready, Biden said.

“I’ve concluded it has closed,” he added. “Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time, time necessary to run a winning campaign.”

Biden’s final decision, announced from the Rose Garden of the White House on Wednesday with his family and President Obama at his side. The announcement brings near to an end a career in elected office that has lasted more than 40 years and a quest for the presidency that has stretched for more than a generation.

In a speech that laid out the themes on which he would have run, Biden called on Democratic candidates to “run on the record” that Obama has compiled over the past seven years. And he repeated a thinly veiled criticism of the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying that the country needs a less partisan political atmosphere.

“As my family and I have worked through the grieving process” after the death of his son, Beau, this summer, “I said all along” that the window for a presidential run might close before they were ready, Biden said.

“I’ve concluded it has closed,” he added. “Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time, time necessary to run a winning campaign.”

Biden’s final decision, announced from the Rose Garden of the White House on Wednesday with his family and President Obama at his side. The announcement brings near to an end a career in elected office that has lasted more than 40 years and a quest for the presidency that has stretched for more than a generation.

In a speech that laid out the themes on which he would have run, Biden called on Democratic candidates to “run on the record” that Obama has compiled over the past seven years. And he repeated a thinly veiled criticism of the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying that the country needs a less partisan political atmosphere.

Moreover, in what has proved to be an unpredictable campaign dominated by political outsiders, Biden’s brand as an authentic — some say gaffe-prone — political warrior might have suited the times.

The Huffington Post notes what has now almost become a constant in our politics:

Oh, Bill Kristol. You were wrong about the Iraq War, you were wrong about Obama losing to Hillary Clinton in 2008, and you were very, very wrong about Vice President Joe Biden running for president:

Biden confirms to Obama at lunch today he's running, announces at U Delaware tomorrow. You can feel the Joementum!

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 20, 2015

Politico:

Biden’s ultimate decision not to run mirrors his situation twelve years ago, when he chose not to pursue the 2004 nomination after considering it. But he knew what he would have been up against had he chosen to jump in: he ran unsuccessfully in both 1988 and 2008.
This time around, Biden had no political or campaign infrastructure in place, while both Clinton and Sanders have been running for months, and each have full-scale staffs at their headquarters and in early-voting states.
Democrats also believed time had largely run out for the 36-year veteran of the Senate, since he only had around three months before voting began in earnest, presenting him with the challenge of building formidable fundraising and organizing operations within a tight timeframe, with many professional Democrats already working for his rivals.
Plus, his allies would likely have had to build an associated super PAC and convince top donor targets to contribute quickly — likely a difficult task when facing Clinton’s well-funded operation that has already wrapped up many top donors.
Meanwhile, his window to the nomination was never entirely open: his advisors had signaled that he would take a nontraditional path, focusing most of his attention on South Carolina and Nevada — two early-voting states where Clinton leads Sanders by wide margins — rather than Iowa and New Hampshire, where the two front-runners have been organizing for months.
Biden signaled no intention to back Clinton or any of her opponents, instead promising to play a role in the 2016 debate. On top of declaring the importance of finding a cure for cancer, Biden said he would use the remainder of his time as vice president to influence the national discussion.
“We intend to spend the next 15 months fighting for what we’ve always cared about, what my family’s always cared about, with every ounce of our being,” he said.
“I am absolutely certain we are capable of accomplishing extraordinary things. And when we do, America won’t just win the future. We will own the finish line.”

Bloomberg Business:

But in an Aug. 1 column in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd reported that Biden was “talking to friends, family and donors about jumping in” and that at the end of his life Beau sought to convince his father to run. An outside group, Draft Biden, was formed to raise money and lay organizational groundwork. And Biden ramped up his private and public dialogue, including meeting on Aug. 22 with Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and Wall Street critic embraced by many party liberals.
At the same time, he was up against societal forces of change and a hunger in the Democratic Party for a first woman president to follow the first black president. He also faced a formidable opponent with Clinton, a former secretary of state, U.S. senator and first lady, who was amassing talented operatives, major donors and an organizational structure as Biden focused on and later grieved for his son.
Nor did there seem to be a hunger among voters for Biden to enter the race. In a Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm New Hampshire Poll, Biden placed a distant third behind Clinton and Sanders.
Biden, meanwhile, lacked strong bases of support in Iowa, the first caucus state. If he were to run, his success would hinge on an ability to win in South Carolina. Even then, his path likely would have required sizable portions of the Democratic establishment to abandon Clinton.
Biden’s third place showing in most polls “is more to do with how strong her and Bernie’s hold is on their voters,” according to Joe Trippi, who was a chief strategist for Democratic presidential candidates Howard Dean in 2004 and John Edwards in 2008. That, he added, would have made it harder for Biden to go on the attack against his potential rivals.

As seen on Fox News:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fTZXx4yxhU

The Hill:

Biden’s decision to opt out of the race is great news for Clinton, and solidifies her standing as the likely Democratic nominee.

While polls have found Clinton would have led Biden if he entered the race, they also suggested that he would have taken a chunk of her polling support.

The timing of Biden’s announcement also helps Clinton. It came one day before she was scheduled to testify in front of a House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, when Republican lawmakers could grill her over her email account.

For weeks, it appeared support for a Biden campaign was growing as Clinton struggled to contain the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server as secretary of State.

But last Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate appeared to be a turning point in Biden’s decision-making process, with many political observers speculating that Clinton’s strong performance had closed the window on a possible Biden campaign.

Polls released after the debate indicated Clinton improved her standing with voters, expanding her lead over Biden in a hypothetical matchup in the Democratic primary.

Biden appeared to hurt himself further on Tuesday, when he said he was not opposed to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The comments contradicted his previous statements that he had advised against the raid —one of Obama’s most consequential decisions in office.

Who the viceBut Biden made it clear he’s not ready to throw his support behind Clinton. He offered a glimpse of the case he would have made on the campaign trail on issues like income inequality and foreign military intervention and he said its crucial for Democrats to position themselves as defenders of the Obama-Biden legacy.

Although he is not entering the race, Biden said he won’t be silent on the issues he cares about during the final 15 months of his vice presidency.

Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore:

For months you could imagine the Biden talk wasn’t really coming from him, but from the combined imaginations of his friends, MSM Hillary-haters, Democratic panic-mongers, and of course Republicans. But aside from the leaks coming unmistakably close to him and his family that an announcement was imminent, his fairly open criticism of HRC’s theory of governance made it imperative that he clarify his intensions.

He did so today, with—remarkably—the president beside him, in a fairly long (given the circumstances) speech in which his conclusion that “the window has closed” on a presidential campaign seemed almost an aside. Indeed, after hearing him yet again implicitly criticize Clinton’s “enemies” reference to Republicans, and being distracted for a few crucial seconds, I didn’t hear the critical “withdrawal” sentence and for a while wondered if the mystery was going to be continued.

In any event, the deed is done, and the chattering classes can now focus on Clinton’s testimony before the Benghazi! Committee tomorrow with the only other thing on their minds being the pasodoble Paul Ryan’s performing with the House Freedom Conference.

Liberaland:

What Biden did not say were two words: Hillary Clinton. He didn’t endorse her or even mention her. He did, however say Republicans should not be regarded as the enemy, a knock at something Clinton said during the first Democratic debate.

Doug Mataconis:

Going forward, of course, the question will be what impact Biden’s decision will have on the race for the Democratic nomination. Based on the polling that has been done in recent weeks, it seems most likely that this decision will benefit Hillary Clinton and increase the gap between her and Senator Sanders both nationally and at the state level. While not all of the polls have done this, most recent polling the Democratic race has asked respondents who they would support if Biden didn’t run, and the responses to that question have shown that the vast majority of support that Biden garnered in the polls, which typically averaged between ten and fifteen percent, went to Clinton. This makes sense for many of the reasons I stated above, and because it was apparent at some point that many of the people backing Biden were long time Democrats most concerned about putting forward a strong candidate for November 2016. Backing Biden, at least on paper, allowed them to take a “wait and see” attitude toward Clinton, who faltered a few times during the summer. Now that Biden’s out, it’s likely that a good portion of this group will rally around Clinton, especially as we get to the actual voting and the party becomes eager to wrap the nomination up and unite behind a candidate while Republicans will still likely be fighting what promises to be a contentious primary battle. This could change, of course, if Clinton falters again, or if her testimony tomorrow before the House Select Committee investigating the Benghazi attack becomes a political problem, but for the most part it seems clear that Biden’s decision to forego a third run for the White House has made Clinton’s inevitable victory in the race for the Democratic nomination even more inevitable.

This certainly makes Hillary’s life a lot easier. It also puts additional pressure on Obama to sandbag the FBI investigation into Hillary’s mishandling of top secret information and influence peddling while Secretary of State. If she flames out based on her inherent criminality, the Democrats will be stuck with Bernie Sanders. And no conservative political blog should be allowed to have that much fun

Hot Air’s Allahpundit:

Update: He says the window has closed on running a winning campaign, which you can interpret as either (a) an acknowledgment that Hillary did well enough at the debate last week to make a Biden candidacy superfluous to centrist Dems or (b) an admission that he simply dragged his feet too long in deciding whether to get in. Hard to believe an old pro like Biden with plenty of aides might have been at risk of missing any key deadlines, but there were a lot of them — and coming to grips with the sheer logistical challenge of running this light might explain Biden’s apparent last-minute decision not to run. Maybe he was inclined to jump in and then sobered up once he realized how much work was still left to do just to qualify for the ballot. Hard to believe, but I don’t know why the rumors of a candidacy would be so wrong otherwise.

Update: For an “I’m not running” speech, he sure did go on and on at the podium — and sounded a lot like a candidate in doing so. I think this is more of an “I’m not running, unless” speech, actually: Just in case the DOJ shocks the world by indicting Hillary or another scandal blows up in her face, Biden’s letting Democrats know that he’s a solid Plan B. In case of emergency, break glass and vote Joe.

A CROSS SECTION OF TWEETS: