October 21, 2015 11:14 AM UTC

Biden Declines Run As Hillary Consolidates Support

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• by: Colorado Pols

CNN:

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 his wife, Jill, and President Barack Obama at his side in the White House Rose Garden, Biden said the period of grieving his family has endured after the death of his son Beau meant that the window for a successful campaign “has closed.”

Still, Biden positioned himself as a defender of the Obama legacy and made clear he views himself as the best possible successor to the President. In tone, the remarks sounded like the kind of speech defending staunch Democratic values that he might have given had he reached the opposite conclusion.

“While I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent,” he said in a speech that highlighted Democratic themes on income inequality along with a call for a national movement to cure cancer. “I intend to speak out clearly and forcefully, to influence as much as I can where we stand as a party and where we need to go as a nation.”

The broad consensus in the wake of this announcement is that Joe Biden’s window of opportunity to get into the presidential race closed after Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s strong debate performance on October 13th in Las Vegas. Perhaps most helped by opponent Bernie Sanders’ powerful call for the Democratic base to move past the GOP’s strategy of hyping petty scandals against Clinton, since that debate it’s become much clearer that Hillary has the strength to fight through the kitchen-sink attacks and own the primary.

Biden’s decision to stay out of the race is thus a large momentum boost for Hillary’s campaign, and could be pivotal to helping her consolidate support ahead of the first primary states. Looking ahead, a successful Hillary Clinton nomination and campaign could result in big coattail assists for Democratic candidates–in particular, for self-evident reasons, women like Democratic CD-6 candidate Morgan Carroll, but also for Michael Bennet and others down the ticket. As the opportunity to elect the nation’s first woman president begins to take shape, there is a scenario in which her campaign becomes a game-changing political snowball, with ramifications for American politics even greater than the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Yes, we know, the Hillary haters in your life do not want to hear this.