It’s Joe’s fight – & now’s his moment

You have heard all of the reasons why Joe Biden shouldn’t run for President again, something he first tried to do nearly 30 years ago. He is 73 years old this November and would be 74 a few weeks after Election Day in 2016. And this Democratic nomination is supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s to lose, even as she seems to spend a lot of her time doing just that. Biden is not supposed to have the kind of machine that could ever go up against the Clinton machine, or the kind of money to go up against it. Even though his late son, Beau, whom Biden buried just two months ago, wanted his father to make one last run, no one except Joe Biden knows the toll that the loss of one more of his children has taken on his great heart.

But he ought to run for President, because his party would be better for it, and so would his country.

Joe Biden should do this sooner rather than later. He should raise his own feisty, populist ruckus at this time when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders make the most noise, as if they’re trying to get elected President of summer, and Hillary Clinton is in a steel-cage match against her own emails, and herself.

If there’s one big thing that Trump and Sanders have shown us so far is that there are so many voters who have embraced messages, whether coming from the far left or the right, that are raw and loud and unfiltered. If we know anything about Biden by now — for all the times in his career when he has tripped over his own message — it is that he has never had much of a filter. And he has never lacked for humanity, all the way back to when he was a kid in Scranton, Pa.

The thunder that even an old-time socialist like Bernie Sanders has shaken down in the first months of this campaign, that is exactly the kind of noise Joe Biden can make, and should make. Would it seem like he was late coming to all this, the way Robert F. Kennedy was late to the party in 1968, when Eugene McCarthy not only beat him to the race, but also to showing how vulnerable Lyndon Johnson was? It would. But it ultimately didn’t matter in ’68, and wouldn’t matter now.

I asked a close friend of Biden’s the other day to give me odds on the vice president actually doing this, after seeking the counsel of fellow Democrats and his family, especially his sister, Valerie. “I still make it 35%,” he said. When I asked why, even though this kind of fight seems to be made for Biden, especially against the Clintons, for whom Biden has no use, the friend said, “He’s honestly not sure he has the energy. And he doesn’t want to go out losing to the Clintons again.”

There are other issues, about filing deadlines, and getting on the ballots in primary states. But for now there is no looming deadline for Joe Biden. If Clinton continues to be dogged by email issues and server issues and congressional inquiries — and a campaign about as bloodless as a corporate takeover — he could still get into the thing in the fall. And if he doesn’t, you keep hearing that Secretary of State Kerry just might.

But Biden should get into it as soon as possible, if for no other reason that he is a better candidate than so many of the men and women from both parties who have somehow convinced themselves that they can be President the way kids convince themselves they’re going to grow up to be astronauts. But if 73-year-old Bernie Sanders can somehow throw a scare into Clinton, imagine what 73-year-old Joe Biden, who would have a real chance to beat her, might do. And what fun that would be.

“Is this happening again?” Larry Wilmore said on “The Nightly Show.” “A candidate of passion is about to overtake Hillary Clinton again? Is she about to be Obama-ed by an old white man?”

For now, Sanders continues to draw the crowds and Trump draws the crowds, as if they are the real outsiders in the race. Joe Biden is hardly an outsider after the life he has led in Washington. But as much as so much of the country hates Washington these days and the business of politics, there has always been something human about him, and real. You saw it the day he stood in a Wilmington church, St. Anthony of Padua, stood by his son’s coffin, and greeted those who filed past that coffin for 11 hours.

Biden has to know this is his kind of action, and his kind of fight, one he should not sit out. This shouldn’t just be Bernie’s moment to make the kind of noise he’s making in this campaign. It should be Joe Biden’s, too.