When Obama Talked Biden Out of Running for President

Barack Obama stood in the Rose Garden, watching Joe Biden announce that he wasn’t going to run for president—exactly what he wanted and had helped make happen.

Four years later, the president has come a long way on his views of a Biden run.

For many Democrats, Biden’s 2020 announcement today is the bookend to the anxiety and regret they’ve been filled with since Election Night 2016, when they watched the “blue wall” of midwestern states fall away from Hillary Clinton: He would have held on to those white working-class voters and beaten Donald Trump, they believe. He would have won.

“It’s one of the great imponderables,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who supported Clinton but immediately endorsed Biden today, told me hours before the former vice president released a campaign video that he will follow with events in Pittsburgh and a tour of the early primary states over the next two weeks.

[Read: Joe Biden is running for president]

Biden has had that conversation about what might have been in 2016 with himself over the past two and a half years, and he was having it with Obama four years ago.

This time around, Biden said he’s running as an “Obama-Biden