Joe Biden will appear at the same event as Sen. Elizabeth Warren weeks after the vice president’s meeting with the liberal icon set off speculation about a 2016 presidential run that is crescendoing this week.
Both Democrats will appear back-to-back during a midday keynote session of a infrastructure forum hosted by the Carnegie Endowment, but they will not share the stage a the same time, according to an organizer, and it’s unclear if they’ll even have any interaction.
Warren and Biden have both been the subject of intense 2016 media conjecture and draft campaigns trying to get them to enter the 2016 race, and Biden has just days or weeks to decide on a run.
The Massachusetts senator made it clear early this year she has no interest in running for president when liberal groups tried to draft her. Biden is still weighing his options on a presidential run, and Warren’s brand would a valuable asset to any Democratic presidential candidate.
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Warren met with Biden privately at his Naval Observatory residence in late August, leading some to speculate that he asked for her support or possibly even offered her the vice presidential spot on his ticket. Both Biden and Warren have been mostly mum about the meeting.
Warren’s outside allies note it seems unlikely she would share a ticket with Biden, since Warren and Biden have been at odds on a number of issues important to the senator. Biden has long represented Delaware, a major banking and credit card center, while Warren has been a crusader against the agenda pushed by these industries in Washington.
On Sunday, she recounted a fight they had over a controversial bankruptcy bill. “It was over bankruptcy laws that the credit card companies wanted to just tighten those bankruptcy laws so they could squeeze more profits out of working families. And Senator Biden was on one side in that fight and I was on the other. And you better believe I didn’t hold back,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Still, she added: “Joe Biden is somebody who cares about America. And who cares about America’s families. I think that’s been true for a long time. So that’s what the conversation was about.” Warren was harsher in a 2002 op-ed published in the New York Times, when she called out Biden by name and said his bankruptcy policy would be bad for women. The two never overlapped in the Senate their lunch at Biden’s home this summer was her first one-on-one meeting with Biden, and her first to trip the Naval Observatory, according to the Boston Globe.
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