Joe Biden in Winter

'The only thing I know is I ain't changing my brand. I know what I believe. I'm confident in what I know. And I'm gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don't like it, I understand.' Vice President Joe Biden and I were riding the Amtrak to Philly on a frigid February day. I had asked about 2016 and whether America was ready, at long last, to elect a guy with such a mouth. There he was, barely cracking double digits in the polls, abandoned by the party big shots, and appearing, beyond all good sense, like he wanted nothing more than another crack at the presidency.

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J oe Biden was gearing up for the 2012 campaign when Ted Kaufman mailed him a quote, in one of his periodic attempts to gently steer the high-maintenance muscle car that is his best friend and surrogate brother. The passage came from the soon-to-be Pope John XXIII, circa 1945, and was meant as a reminder that Biden, while on the brink of another four-year term, was reaching an age of reflection and reckoning. 'I must not disguise myself from the truth,' the quote began. 'I am definitely approaching old age. My mind resents this and almost rebels, for I still feel so young, eager, agile and alert. But one look in the mirror disillusions me. This is the season of maturity.'

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Biden's reply, scrawled on the original missive, came back fast, as if he had just been sitting there waiting for a chance to argue the point, in the form of another quote, this one from the poet Dylan Thomas. 'Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'

Biden may rage, but by any reasonable reckoning, night is falling on his singular four-decade political career. At 71, he is in the second year of a second White House term, restless in his role as second fiddle to Barack Obama, especially now that he is once again being upstaged by Hillary Clinton, Obama's presumed Democratic heir. The tickled-alligator grin is still famously affixed to Biden's face, but there's a lot more going on behind those Ray-Bans these days.

Joe Biden in winter is still basically a happy warrior, but the past couple years have been a struggle for both relevance and leverage-a fight largely hidden from public view, between the presidential dreams he can't quite relinquish and the shrinking parameters of a job he described to me as derivative, borrowed and 'totally reflective of the president's power.'

Almost all White House partnerships deteriorate in the end, undone by diverging politics, festering policy disputes-or simply human fatigue amid the strains of trying to turn what is inevitably a shotgun marriage into a love match. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were barely on speaking terms by the time the disputed 2000 election came around, with Gore furious at Clinton's sexual indiscretions and Clinton appalled at Gore's lame political skills. Even the celebrated team of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came unraveled by the final few years, as Bush abandoned the hawkish policies of his veep and turned to a more conciliatory set of advisers.

How does this one end?

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OPTICS: Seven years of Joe and Hill (click to view gallery)

When we talk, Biden tells me he'll respond by embracing 'my guy' Obama even harder, but it's clear he could use his guy to reciprocate: Over the past year, Harry Reid, the ornery Senate majority leader, has elbowed Biden out of the budget process he dominated not so long ago, and the White House seems OK with that. There was even the report last fall, over-torqued but nonetheless embarrassing, that Obama's team had mused about booting Biden off the 2012 ticket in favor of Hillary Clinton. As if that wasn't bad enough, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has taken it as his own personal mission to dismantle Biden's elder statesman status, declaring in his recent memoir that Biden had been 'wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.'

Looming over it all is the question of whether Biden will run in 2016. 'He's in a predicament. It's so big, it's almost literary,' a member of Obama's inner circle told me, shortly after a Washington Post/ABC poll showed Clinton leading Biden by an epic 73 to 12 percent, the widest margin ever recorded for a presidential frontrunner. 'Never in his entire life has this man been better positioned to get the thing he most wants: the presidency. He's climbed almost all the way to the top. And guess what? Somebody moved the ladder. How would you deal with that?'

He's climbed almost all the way to the top. And guess what? Somebody moved the ladder. How would you deal with that?'

Forget the politics. Biden is enduring a trial that many people of his age-and that includes 66-year-old Hillary Clinton-are forced to confront: He can see the end of the road approaching, and fast, but the gas gauge still reads full. Biden simply isn't ready to quit. It's not clear he even knows how. He's a comeback addict, a restless striver who believes that anyone who isn't climbing is falling. Besides, it's a much, much smarter bet to keep people guessing, no matter what he finally decides: Nobody in D.C. gains influence by declaring they are playing out the string. And sure enough, Biden has been out making that very point during a spate of media appearances this winter, insisting his decision won't have anything to do with Clinton's. 'I honestly don't know what I'm going to do,' he told me after an event in late January. 'I'll make the decision after the [2014] midterms. I've got a lot on my plate.'

Laugh if you want, but Biden is seriously considering a run, to hell with the naysayers who insist he is too old (73 in 2016) and too undisciplined ('Bidenism' after all, has its own entry in the Urban Dictionary). Every one of the dozen Biden friends I interviewed predicted he wouldn't actually run for president in 2016. Then again, every single one also said it wouldn't be a surprise if he jumped in at the last minute to 'keep this great ride going as long as possible,' as one veteran Biden staffer told me.

At 71, Biden is in the second year of a second White House term, restless in his role as second fiddle to Barack Obama. | Pete Souza/White House

'He's driven, that's the best way to put it,' says Bruce Reed, who was Biden's chief of staff from 2011 through the end of 2013. 'He wants to be part of it all. ... It's not really ambition in the traditional sense. It's a restless energy, the desire to keep going. ... You never know what you are going to get.'

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It's a January morning in Detroit, and Joe Biden is running late. The snow is blowing sideways outside the MotorCity Hotel and Casino, a silver and neon Edsel of a place overlooking blocks of curiously tidy abandoned lots and many, many liquor stores. Biden's motorcade is idling uneasily 15 minutes past his scheduled 9 a.m. departure time, and one of his Secret Service guys, the one who hates flying as much as Biden loves it, is peering at his watch, wondering how many times they are going to have to de-ice Air Force Two before the scheduled wheels-up at noon. Biden, whose carefree reputation belies an obsession with preparation, is upstairs laboring over the speech he will deliver at the nearby auto show.

The show is a high point of the year for Detroit, a city that can't even afford to maintain its streetlights, and a good-as-it-gets photo op for the vice president in a midterm election year. But Detroit is still a surreal mix of rebirth and rot, and there is palpable disappointment that Biden, not Obama, has come to visit a troubled place that is among the nation's bluest politically and blackest demographically.

Glenn Thrush is a senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.