United State’s Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Wednesday that he would not run for president, ending a period of remarkably public agonizing and clearing away one of the biggest potential obstacles to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s path to the Democratic nomination in 2016.
In a hurriedly arranged speech in the White House Rose Garden with President Obama at his side, Mr. Biden said that he and his family had overcome their grief at the death of his elder son enough to commit themselves to the rigors of a campaign. But with just days until the first filing deadlines, he said he had concluded that it was simply too late.
“Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time, the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination,” Mr. Biden said. “But while I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent.”
Indeed, he used the rest of his 13-minute speech to outline the case he would have made as a candidate and even take a few implicit jabs at Mrs. Clinton over her hawkish foreign policy, hostility to Republicans and breaks with Mr. Obama on certain issues.
The end of Mr. Biden’s three-month flirtation with another bid for the White House came in the last few days as he and his advisers looked at the calendar and concluded that he did not have enough time to raise the necessary money and still campaign sufficiently in person in the first four primary states.
After skipping the first Democratic debate last week, Mr. Biden called a handful of operatives he hoped would work on a campaign and left them with the impression he was ready to run. With his advisers, Greg Schultz, Mike Donilon and Michael Schrum, listening on a speaker phone, Mr. Biden told the operatives that he had “the strongest chance to continue the work Barack has done,” according to Democrats who discussed the private calls on condition of anonymity. He added that he believed Mrs. Clinton could lose to the Republicans.
But when he asked their advice on how to raise the estimated $30 million he would need for the early states and $40 million he would need to reach the Super Tuesday contests, they told him it could not be done in the time available.
Mr. Biden’s advisers concluded he could raise the money but not without sacrificing necessary days on the ground in the early states campaigning. After subtracting the time needed for an estimated 40 fund-raisers, the holiday period when little campaigning is done and time for debate preparations, that would leave Mr. Biden with perhaps 40 to 45 days to devote to retail stumping before the Iowa caucuses in February.
The dynamics of the Democratic race had changed in just days. Mrs. Clinton’s performance in the debate last week had settled restless Democratic donors, and even party elders like Representative James E. Clyburn from the crucial state of South Carolina, whom Mr. Biden deeply respects, said publicly he should not run.
Mr. Biden met with advisers several times on Tuesday, then convened a small group at the vice president’s residence late at night after returning from an evening dinner honoring former Vice President Walter F. Mondale. At that point, aides said, he decided he would not run and after sleeping on it stuck to the decision on Wednesday morning, when he informed Mr. Obama.
The speech he gave in the Rose Garden nonetheless resembled the one he would have given had he run. He talked about fighting for college education, child care and immigration and promoted “an absolute national commitment to end cancer as we know it today.”
In typical folksy style, he talked about his upbringing, quoted his parents telling him, “Honey, it’s going to be O.K.,” and repeated one of his favorite nicknames, “Middle Class Joe.” And he reflected on his late son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in May. “Beau is our inspiration,” he said.
But he also used the speech to chide Mrs. Clinton. Without mentioning her by name, he criticized her assertion in last week’s debate that Republicans are her enemies. “They are our opposition; they’re not our enemies,” he said, repeating a point he made several times in the previous 48 hours.
He likewise argued against her brand of interventionism in the Middle East and elsewhere. “The argument that we just have to do something when bad people do bad things isn’t good enough,” he said. “It’s not a good enough reason for American intervention and to put our sons’ and daughters’ lives on the line, put them at risk.”
Reading from a prepared text flashed on flat screens in the Rose Garden, Mr. Biden also appeared to reproach Mrs. Clinton for distancing herself from Mr. Obama’s record lately, as she has done on trade, Syria, Arctic drilling and other issues. “Democrats should not only defend this record and protect this record, they should run on this record,” Mr. Biden said.
Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Biden afterward to express her admiration, and former President Bill Clinton spoke with the vice president as well. “Joe Biden is a good man and a great vice president,” Mrs. Clinton said in a written statement. Praising his “passion for our country” and his “devotion to family,” she credited him for a record of fighting for the middle class. “And I’m confident that history isn’t finished with Joe Biden.”
New polls in the last few days suggested that Mrs. Clinton had regained some ground against her closest competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and that Mr. Biden, if he did jump in, had lost some traction. The polls suggested his absence from the field would give her a more commanding position.
Mr. Sanders, who now emerges as the lone figure seriously challenging Mrs. Clinton for the nomination, welcomed Mr. Biden’s decision. “Joe Biden is a man who has devoted his entire life to public service and to the well being of working families and the middle class,” Mr. Sanders told reporters in New York. “He made a difficult decision based on the needs of his family and his view of his future, and I respect the decision that he made.”
Republicans, for their part, used the decision to needle Mrs. Clinton. “I think Joe Biden made correct decision for him and his family,” Donald J. Trump, the leader in most polls for the Republican presidential nomination, said on Twitter. “Personally, I would rather run against Hillary because her record is so bad.”
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Mr. Biden’s ambivalence about running was rooted in raw, and understandable, emotion: By his own account, the vice president has not been entirely himself since Beau Biden died. In public appearances in recent months, he has at times appeared morose and emotionally fragile.
Through most of his vice presidency, Mr. Biden had seemed largely resigned to the idea that he would not run in 2016. But he had seen Beau, the former attorney general of Delaware, as his heir, and some close to him said Mr. Biden began thinking about running to honor his late son.
At the wake for Beau, Mr. Biden told friends that his son in his final days had said he hoped his father would run for president. Mr. Biden shared that story repeatedly in the weeks to follow, striking many who heard it as a form of therapy for a grieving man and not necessarily an indication that he would run.
But questions about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server and the surge of liberal support for Mr. Sanders as an alternative helped persuade the vice president that there could be an opening.
Advisers were deeply divided over whether he should try again after unsuccessful campaigns in 1988 and 2008. Some urged him to jump into the contest, both out of admiration for his four decades of service and antipathy toward the Clintons. Others worried it would only set up Mr. Biden for a crushing defeat that would not help the party.
Never known as an avid fund-raiser, Mr. Biden did not begin courting donors until September and did not always do so in earnest. And while his advisers concluded there were still plenty of operatives available to assemble an organization, the planning remained haphazard until the moment he made his decision.
In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said that despite their grief, his family members had nonetheless blessed another run if he decided to make it. “The family has reached that point,” he said as his wife, Jill, stood next to him.
Gathered in the Rose Garden for the announcement were some of his most trusted advisers, including his sister, Valerie Biden Owens; his chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti; his longtime aide and successor in the Senate, Ted Kaufman; and Mr. Donilon.
Mr. Biden said he would focus on his final stretch in office and gave little hint about what might come after that. “We intend — the whole family, not just me — we intend to spend the next 15 months fighting for what we’ve always cared about, what my family’s always cared about, with every ounce of our being,” he said.