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Vice President Joe Biden has still not ruled out a 2016 presidential run and will make his intentions known by Aug. 1, according to two Democratic sources who have been in contact with his family. While the loss of his son, Beau Biden, last month paused any political planning by the vice president, the sources tell U.S. News that family members have indicated a White House run is still a possibility. He plans to announce his decision sometime prior to the beginning of August.

This week, former Rhode Island Senator and Governor Lincoln Chafee announced he is seeking the Democratic nomination for president in the 2016 election. A key factor in his decision to enter the race is “to bring the much-needed conversion of weights and measurements in this country into line with the metric system.” “The United States is seriously out of step with the rest of the world,” Chafee contended. “When everyone else is using meters and liters it is sheer arrogance for us to be using yards and gallons. It’s like we saying ‘we’re too good to lower ourselves to your...

DES MOINES — A mere 240 people live in the rural northeast Iowa town of Kensett, so when more than 300 crowded into the community center on Saturday night to hear Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, many driving 50 miles, the cellphones of Democratic leaders statewide began to buzz. Kurt Meyer, the county party chairman who organized the event, sent a text message to Troy Price, the Iowa political director for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Price called back immediately. “Objects in your rearview mirror are closer than they appear,” Mr. Meyer said he had told Mr. Price about Mr. Sanders....

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont began drawing implicit contrasts with Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, as he played the liberal purist in throwing down policy gauntlet after gauntlet – a $15 minimum wage, $1 trillion for public works jobs, a “Medicare-for-all” system of universal health care — in his first campaign rally since declaring his candidacy last month. The rally ended with a sing-a-long of the folk anthem “This Land is Your Land” as Mr. Sanders, known as a no-nonsense and rumpled antipolitician, shook hands and frequently flashed...

Socialist genius Bernie Sanders has figured out what's really ailing America. Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Wal-Mart and Payless and DSW and Dick's Sporting Goods. It's a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products and fewer workers manufacturing goods people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger. Nobody parodies the far left better than far-leftists themselves. In an interview with financial journalist John Harwood on...

It’s debatable whether liberals are a strong force in US national politics. But it's much more likely they’re increasingly powerful within the Democratic Party itself.Self-described “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders kicks off his campaign for president on Tuesday in his hometown of Burlington, Vt. He’s hoping to attract an army of left-leaning Democrats who aren’t happy about Hillary Clinton’s past coziness with Wall Street and her Senate vote to authorize the Iraq War. “I know what I believe,” said Senator Sanders in a fundraising e-mail issued prior to the event. “That’s why today marks the beginning of our political revolution.” But...

At some point in the 1970s, a man in Manchester, New Hampshire asks his friend, “What do you think about Mo Udall for president?” The other man replies, “I don’t know, I only met him twice.” Or so goes John McCain’s oft-repeated joke about the Granite State’s brand of personal politics. Now it appears that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is starting to get on New Hampshire’s nerves for being impersonal. The Nashua Telegraph published an editorial Thursday that said a conference call by Clinton’s campaign with local media was “the antithesis of what NH is about.” According to the Telegraph, the...

Inside the long-shot effort to get the vice president on the ballot and stop Hillary's coronation. If these were ordinary times, a happy warrior like Joe Biden would be first out of the starting gate in the race for president. It would be so easy; politicking is what he loves to do. But with Hillary Clinton so dominant in the polls, Biden is hanging back, watching and waiting to see if maybe there’s an opening. He’s telling supporters in the early states that he’ll decide in the next four weeks, or by end of summer. On that thin thread, Draft...

It’s the admission conservatives have been waiting for! Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) just told the world what conservatives have suspected for decades:“Our party has gotten to be a party of liberal elites. That’s great if you want to be in the minority for the next 30 years. That’s not where America is. Democrats have left our lunch-bucket allies behind.”In an interview regarding his opposition to the EPA, Rep. Schrader makes the admission after after calling the EPA the “big problem for economic development in our region.” …

If Michelle Obama decided to run for president in 2016, she would pose the most significant threat, among likely contenders, to Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the Democratic nomination, according to a new Rasmussen poll. A telephone survey of 1,000 likely voters conducted by the polling company found that in a hypothetical match-up between the current first lady and the former secretary of State, Clinton would best Obama 56 percent to 22 percent. That may seem like a significant margin, but according to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling average, Elizabeth Warren, a popular hypothetical challenger to Clinton, receives only 12.5...

Martin O’Malley plans to announce his presidential intentions on May 30 in Baltimore, a move that could present another Democratic challenger to Hillary Rodham Clinton. The former Maryland governor will hold a conference call with top supporters on Thursday night to discuss his plans for the announcement in his adopted hometown, where he served as mayor, an O’Malley aide said Thursday. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning and was not authorized to speak publicly. O’Malley, who completed his second term as governor earlier this year, has been considering a potential challenge to Clinton, the leading...

There will be no breathless stories about how left-wing extremists and obstructionists have hijacked the Democratic Party. No hand-wringing about the state of American politics now that congress has defied the will of the first black president. There will be no scary pieces on how a stubborn minority party is holding up bills that have proven to create jobs – both here and abroad. There’ll be no passionate speeches about the dangers of big-money interests buying democracy. Remember these aren’t your parents’ Democrats. And when Democrats rebelled against Obama’s bipartisan trade initiative this week and voted to stop debate on...

Former Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley said that if he runs for president, he'll launch his campaign in Baltimore: "We haven't had an agenda for America's cities probably since Jimmy Carter ... We have left cities to fend for themselves. ... But look, the structural problems that we have in our economy, the way we ship jobs and profits abroad, the way we failed to invest in our infrastructure and failed to invest in American cities, we are creating the conditions. Please, Speaker Boehner and his crocodile tears about the $130 million, that is a spit in the bucket compared to...

When running for office in 2012, President Obama frequently inveighed against "millionaires and billionaires" who don't pay their fair share of taxes. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist arguably to the left of Obama who plans to run for president in 2016, wants to narrow his focus to just billionaires.

If all it took to get my vote was being a 73-year-old dude who’s grooving out to the folk songs he used to shout-sing in a Vermont jam band, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would have my vote. If you click on the audio button on the lower right (see video on this page), you can hear him shush the reporter who is playing his old music and say “Shhh. I’m getting in the groove here!” What’s not to love, really? If you didn’t know he was a sitting U.S. Senator, there is no way you’d put that on a list...

In case you haven’t heard, Martin O’Malley is looking at challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democrats’ nomination next year. (And judging by the media coverage, you may not have heard unless your last name is O’Malley.) Another thing to be aware of when it comes to O’Malley is that he is a former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, so when the riots broke out this was clearly an appropriate place for him to show up and comment. Or at least somebody on his staff seemed to think so. But as it turned out, not all of the residents...

It’s very easy (and fun) to ridicule Joe Biden as a buffoon, but there are more than a few people who take him seriously as an alternative to Hillary Clinton as Democrat nominee.  Biden fever is rising as Hillary herself is getting harder and harder to take as a serious nominee.  Scott McKay argues in the American Spectator: If ever there was an ill-fitting and ill-considered elevator pitch for a political candidate, it’s the narrative of Hillary Clinton as the defender of ordinary Americans. The sales job, which reportedly was the product of months of consideration from the Clinton...

Following a brief feint in which the White House masterfully exploited the servility of congressional Republicans to create the impression that Barack Obama was still firmly in command of the country’s destiny, the revolt of liberal lawmakers over a proposed free trade has made it clear that the president is very much a lame duck. The internecine fight among Democrats over the Trans-Pacific Partnership has elevated Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to the status as chief liberal opponent of a Democratic White House. “The government doesn’t want you to read this massive new trade agreement. It’s top secret,” Warren said...

Sure, it was tongue in cheek. But still, it revealed an underlying truth . . . On today's Face the Nation, when Bob Schieffer wondered why the Dems have fielded only one presidential candidate, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank responded by suggesting that Schieffer himself should go for it. Milbank said there was a "real opportunity" for someone to run against Hillary by filling the Elizabeth Warren slot and then observed that Schieffer would "have some free time after this summer" [since he has announced his retirement.] Schieffer began a Shermanesque response: "if nominated I would not" before dissolving in...

Why are the Democrats running for president so old? Blame the Clintons. There are five Democrats who have either declared or are thinking about running for president. Three — Joe Biden, Bernard Sanders, and Jim Webb — will be over 70 years old on Inauguration Day 2017. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton will be nine months short of 70. Only Martin O'Malley, who will turn 54 a couple of days before the 2017 swearing-in, has not reached retirement age already. In 2008, Democrats had a 47 year-old candidate who mesmerized the party and ran away with the votes of Americans aged 18...