Biden says he plans to run for reelection in 2024, but here's one reporter's lesson from 2008 on why anything is possible

• In 2008, Joe Biden talked with reporter Nicole Gaudiano about his political future.

• It turned out nothing like he'd predicted.

• Now he says he expects to run for re-election in 2024. Could his plans change?

President Joe Biden says he plans to run for reelection in 2024, but I know better than to make any predictions on his next steps. I learned a lesson from covering his underdog 2008 presidential bid: Anything is possible.

Biden spoke with me a couple of times about his plans around the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses in January of that year. He told me that day he would press on with his campaign at least through the end of the month, "no matter what" Iowa caucus-goers decided.

He dropped out hours later.

He said there was no chance of him becoming vice president.

Yep, there kinda was, ultimately.

And he told me he had "no intention of running for the White House again."

Hmmm.

Years later, I take Biden at his word that, if he stays in good health, he will run again in 2024. I'll bet that's his intention right now, and Biden allies have told me the soon-to-be 80-year-old president is still motivated by his agenda, his obligation to the country and doing whatever it takes to keep former President Donald Trump from returning to the Oval Office.

It sure sounds like he'll run. The White House says he plans on it. But could his plans change?

I'm only asking because on January 3, 2008, I was the young reporter who plopped down near a hot dog stand at the Polk County Convention Center in Des Moines so I could pound out what I thought was hella hot news about his plans to stay in the race, only to see the value of that story vanish within hours.

Back then I was Gannett's Washington correspondent for The News Journal, Biden's hometown newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware. Best-Selling Blackhawk Down author Mark Bowden later described me in a story for The Atlantic as someone who "had been covering Biden's trifle of a campaign for one of the few newspapers still interested."

"You've seen the crowds. They're real," Biden told me that afternoon.

By that stage, it's true that Biden's crowds had grown, but their numbers had nowhere to go but up. There was one particularly large crowd in August at the LumberKings minor league baseball field in Iowa. However, they were there for Hillary Clinton and they started leaving when it was Biden's turn to speak.

Biden continued: "This is my last run for the White House," adding that he was "uniquely qualified" to lead the country at that moment. "I understand if people conclude that's not the case, I respect that. I can die a happy man not having heard 'Hail to the Chief.'"

Now he calls that song a "great tune," even if he says he feels "a little self-conscious" hearing it.

It was actually newsy in 2008 — at least for several hours — that Biden was pledging to keep his campaign going through the end of the month, given that his prospects looked so dismal leading up to caucus night against the star power of Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama, who ultimately won that contest.

He had been saying until then that it would take a fourth-place finish or better in Iowa to keep him in the race. But that afternoon, he told me that at the end of the first four contests  he would "sit down and say, 'Okay, Am I in this or am I not in this?'"

He ended up in fifth place, capturing less than 1%. I caught up with him as he huddled with friends and family after bowing out of the race, leaving the stage and hugging his way through the crowd to the ballroom exit.

'I would not be anybody's vice president. Period. End of story.'

He told me he didn't anticipate that so much of the vote would be consumed by the front-runners and he knew then he couldn't raise money anymore. He was going back to the Senate to hold hearings and hold people accountable as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Any chance for vice president? I asked.

"No," he said. "Look, I can, if we have a Democratic president, I can have much more influence, I promise you," he chuckled, "as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee."

Asked about becoming secretary of state, he first rejected the idea, but then seemed to open the door ever so slightly: "I'd have to be convinced that the nominee, the Democratic president, we really shared the same kind of views," he said.

Of course I noted that opening in my story. Did it amount to anything? Nope.

Given the difficulties Biden was having getting noticed, I had asked him, earlier in the campaign while traveling with him in Iowa, whether he was pursuing any possibilities other than the presidency  He shot them down entirely, even invoking Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

"Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, Shermanesquely, no," he said then. "No. No. I would not be anybody's secretary of state in any circumstance I could think of, and I absolutely can say with certainty I would not be anybody's vice president. Period. End of story. Guaranteed. Will not do it."

Mark Bowden later asked Biden, then vice president, in his West Wing office about that marathon quote. He wrote that Biden "leaned back, folding his big hands before him, and shrugged."

"That was absolutely, positively true when I said it," Biden told him. "I swear to God. Ask anybody. I never, never, never, never aspired to be vice president. It had nothing to do with who the hell the president was."

In his story about Biden called "The Salesman," Bowden wrote that he believed him. "Both quotes, from the campaign trail and from the White House, are so prototypically Biden: direct, earnest, forceful, earthy, overstated — note the triple no in the first and the quadruple never in the second — and ultimately, as it turns out, negotiable," he wrote.

I agree that Biden meant what he said when he said it, Bidenesquely.

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