I don’t know whether or not Joe Biden is going to run for president, but at least I know now that he won’t be appearing in the first debate:

Vice President Joe Biden has extended his window for deciding whether to jump into the 2016 presidential campaign, several Democrats say, allowing the contest to play out even longer before he answers one of the biggest questions hanging over the race for the White House.

He is not preparing for the first Democratic debate on October 13 in Las Vegas and is not expected to participate, people close to him say, because he feels no pressure to reach a decision by then. He is likely to reveal his plans in the second half of October.

According to Jeff Zeleny’s reporting for CNN, Team Biden is better prepared than you might think:

Campaign managers in key early-voting states have already been identified. Dozens of major donors have stepped forward. Domestic and foreign policy advisers are waiting in the wings.

Ed Kilgore is highly skeptical that “the campaign is right there at the failsafe point, loaded with money and volunteers and just awaiting word from The Chief.”

I’m not really all that skeptical about it, actually. And I think the First Look folks are overwrought and basically ridiculous:

…as Biden appears to stretch his timeframe (remember when we were supposed to get a decision at the end of summer?), here’s an honest truth: The Biden waiting game is no longer doing him or his party any favors. With Clinton and Sanders having already raised a combined $115 million (more on that below), waiting to start raising money isn’t going to help him compete financially with Clinton, let alone Sanders. The waiting game has paralyzed parts of the non-Hillary wing of the Democratic establishment. And as our NBC/WSJ poll shows, Biden disproportionally takes away support from Clinton when the vice president is included in the polling. As we’ve said before, if Biden wants to run and win (and start preparing to build a $1 billion enterprise for the general election in our Super PAC/501c4 Era), he has to get in ASAP. He doesn’t have until late October or early November. Sure, we get that Biden seems to be waiting to see how October fares for Hillary (see above). But that waiting game comes at a cost.

Here’s the deal. I don’t think Joe Biden needs to worry about having enough money to compete with either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. If he gets in, he’ll have a decent enough donor network to begin with. He doesn’t need to raise his name recognition and he can get free press any time he wants it. There are lots of Obama loyalists who will want to protect his legacy, others who will want to hedge their bets, and Biden has a pretty healthy network he developed over his career in the Senate. I guess the way to put it is that he doesn’t need as much money as the others and he’ll be able to compete in the early states even with a money disadvantage.

What he needs more than money is an organization. He needs field troops. It’s here where he’ll have the hardest time competing because the Clintons have a huge headstart, there’s two of them, and they did this in a big way just eight years ago. Meanwhile, Sanders has a growing army of progressive true-believers who will outwork anything Biden or Clinton can come up with.

But I don’t see how this disadvantage is all that time-sensitive. It’d be better to have a couple extra weeks to identify and mobilize your shock troops, but that’s more about mitigating a structural weakness than crafting a winning strategy. It’s better for Biden to get in at a moment when it makes sense to the voters than a moment when it makes sense to Chuck Todd. So, if Clinton doesn’t do great in the first debate, or she looks bad at the Benghazi! hearing, or Sanders continues to dominate her in Iowa and New Hampshire and catches up in the national polls, then Biden coming in will be seen less as stepping on Clinton’s toes than rescuing the party from a dud of a nominee.

Biden the Savior!

It’ll look a lot better than Biden the “Not Sure if I’ve Got the Fire in the Belly” guy we’re seeing right now.

You know, his son Beau just died. Reportedly, Beau asked him to run for president. I can’t really imagine what that’s like, can you?

If Biden’s Hamlet routine is a little inconvenient for “the party” and some people who are trying to game this out, well, too goddamned bad.

He’s got time to make a decision, and we have time to wait for it.

I hear his friends say that he won’t run and other friends say that he will run.

All I know is that if he runs he’ll be a little more formidable that Carly Freaking Fiorina or Ben Carson.

I hope he does run. And I hope we waits until he’s good and ready to tell us his decision.

Lastly, I find the whole narrative that he’ll only do it to save us from Bernie to be a load of manure. If he does it, he’ll do it because he thinks he can win. Perhaps he’ll do it to honor his son’s dying wish. He won’t do it just to spite progressives.