POLITICO “It took a little bit longer than we anticipated.” Joe Biden, pictured next to his wife Jill, gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill to announce his decision to withdraw as a candidate for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination on Sept. 23, 1987. | Ron Edmonds/AP Photo Updated: Link Copied Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988 ended in such disaster that veterans of that effort still call it the “'87 campaign” — a humbling nod to the fact that Biden dropped out before the calendar year of the actual election. “I always tell my children: That campaign hung in there right up until the middle of the end of the beginning,” said Richard Martin, the Biden campaign’s deputy press secretary in Iowa.