Joe could have been a contender…
Via Daily Beast:
Without cancer, Joe Biden might be just about to start his eighth week as the 45th president of the United States.
In one of the many alternative timelines of the 2016 election, Vice President Biden decided to get in the Democratic primary race, overtook Hillary Clinton as the consensus establishment candidate after the email issue began to plague her candidacy. Then, Biden was able to take Donald Trump “behind the gym,” so to speak, and win over enough working-class white voters in the Midwest to get himself elected as president in November.
But that’s not the timeline we’re living in. Instead, Biden made the extremely difficult decision to bow out of the race during the final months of 2015. It was in September, less than four months after his son Beau Biden succumbed to an all-too-common form of brain cancer, that the vice president appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and said that emotionally, he just wasn’t ready to take on the challenge of running for president.[…]
Now, Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office and Joe Biden is speaking at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
On Sunday afternoon, a tanned and tie-less Biden spoke to a packed convention hall—demand was so high SXSW had to issue special wristbands that were gone within minutes—about his new mission in life: stopping cancer in its tracks.
During his final year as VP, Biden launched what he called the White House Cancer Moonshot. Now, that initiative is moving from the government sector to the non-profit sphere as part of the newly-formed Biden Foundation.
Introduced by his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, to cheers of “come back” from the crowd, the former vice president began with a joke about Pharrell Williams before turning more serious. “Your presence speaks volumes,” he said, recognizing how many people in the audience have been “touched” by cancer, with 16 million dying every year currently and up to 26 million per year predicted by 2020.
Biden said the initiative grew out of a desire to “spare other families” from having to go through what he and Jill did when they lost their son. And he continued to open up about his realization that both he and his family didn’t have the “stomach” for a grueling presidential campaign so soon after losing Beau.
He decided not to run, he said, after a “long talk” with President Obama. And the idea for the Cancer Moonshot came out of an off-hand comment he made to the president as they prepared to inform the press about his decision to remove himself from the presidential conversation in the White House Rose Garden.