They're never going to leave. Politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and now, Joe Biden, continue to insert themselves into the American political scene despite their heyday having come and gone.

Joe Biden is back for sure, playing the race-card schtick, despite the fact that he's one of the most improbable practitioners of it, given his age, his whiteness, and his history of racially insensitive remarks.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday evening urged Americans to stand up to hate groups – and took direct aim at President Donald Trump, who he said “has publicly proclaimed the moral equivalency of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and those who oppose their hate.”

Speaking at the centennial fundraising dinner for the Charleston branch of the NAACP, Biden said, “This is a moment for this nation to declare what this president can’t with any clarity, consistency, or vision: there is no place in America for hate groups.”

Politico thinks he's running for office, given his string of political grandstandings, from his article in the Atlantic, to a foreign policy op-ed he wrote shortly afterward in the New York Times, to his economic statements at the University of Delaware at the opening of a new institute named after him, to his very appearance in South Carolina, where early voting is taking place.

He's even said he's not ruling out 2020.

Is he serious? Well, Politico thinks so. And that raises questions about what kind of shape the Democratic Party is really in that someone like Biden, who is in his 70s, could see 2020 as his great political opportunity, his time to shine after failing, much to his regret, to run for president as a Democrat against Donald Trump in 2016.

Seriously, is Biden going to attract the Black vote? Is he going to attract the youth vote? Is he going to be attractive to immigrants? These are all key members of the coalition that elected President Obama in 2008.

And yet - he's pretty much all Democrats have got, given their thin bench in the wake of the Obama administration with its exclusive focus on a single personality, rather than a movement. Obama sucked the life out of the Democratic Party as he governed by decrees and executive orders, all of which were unpopular and spilled over onto the Democratic Party and left it desolate. Democrats lost more than 1,000 legislative seats across the country on Obama's watch.

If Politico is right, then we can expect to hear more from Joe Biden as he makes increasingly more virulent, and in his case, stupid, statements in the bid to seize what's left of the Democrats and come forward as their standard-bearer. He should have been put to pasture years ago, but the lust for power in these people is eternal, and the enfeebled establishment won't be able to fight them off or offer any new faces.