So Joe Biden is in:

“I am running for president,” Mr. Biden said toward the end of an appearance on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

“I’m going to be Joe Biden, and I’m going to try to be the best Biden I can be,” he said. “If I can, I got a shot. If I can’t, I lose.”

I want to give the senator a vote of confidence: I'm fairly certain that he will be the best Biden he can be, and that no one else in the race will come close to being a better Biden. And to use one of his favorite phrases, I'm not being facetious.

I will, however, remember a few lines about Biden's first presidential campaign from What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer, because when you read a 1,051 page monolith about the 1988 presidential race, you find yourself wanting to use anecdotes from it and justify the enormous amount of time spent reading it.

But [Biden] really couldn't blow off the press conference, or delay it for a day... no more than he could hold off Bork [who Reagan had nominated that day]... no more than he could hold off the debate, which went off that night, as scheduled. Biden seemed barely there. He never made a dent, couldn't seem to connect. Dukakis, Gephardt - they both made points. But Joe looked like he'd dropped in from outer space. The fact was, he'd chucked Pat [Caddell's] message one day before — and he didn't have a new one. He didn't have time to think up one line! On stage, his answers wandered, they went nowhere. His smile would jump up in the middle of a sentence, as if he'd thought of something funny but didn't mean to share it. Tom Shales, the TV critic, wrote the next day, for the Washington Post:

"Biden... appears to be overadvised and suffering from excessive consultitis. Worse, he comes across on TV as someone whose fuse is always lit."

"Unless we ditch television for the remainder of the campaign, Biden will never be President."

There's a slogan: "Biden 2008: Let's Prove Tom Shales Wrong."