Joe Biden with son Beau in 2008.
That famed deathbed moment with Beau Biden imploring his father to run for president?
Fiction, says Vice President Joe Biden, who should know:
“Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win,” Biden said. “But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run,’ like, win this one for the Gipper.
“It wasn’t anything like that.”
So it's a particularly interesting question
where Maureen Dowd got her story, which, granted, put the conversation at a table, but set "Beau's heartwrenching brink-of-death demand" narrative that was central to so much of the speculation about Biden running.
In reality, Biden says he would have liked to have run, but "dealing with the loss of Beau, any parent listening who’s lost a child knows that you can’t—it doesn’t follow schedules of primaries and caucuses and contributors and the like." Rather than pushing Biden into the race, in other words, it kept him out.