Is Biden trying to be the progressive alternative to Hillary?

Vice President Joe Biden isn't revealing his plans for 2016, but his campaign-style speech at Sen. Tom Harkin's annual steak fry in Iowa on Sunday set off a fresh wave of speculation that he wants to make a third bid for the White House.

Harkin's event has been a launching pad for Democratic presidential hopefuls ever since 1991, when Harkin used it to announce his own run for the presidency. The last time Biden spoke at the shindig was as a presidential candidate in 2007, although he went on to finish a distant fifth in Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses, behind Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Biden appears to be a long shot, with a new CNN poll showing him with the support of just 10 percent of Democrats and left-leaning independents. Clinton, who hasn't said yet whether she'll run, is the runaway front-runner with 65 percent.

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Biden's speech, however, offered some hints at how he might be planning to close the gap.

Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan note at The Washington Post that the vice president presented himself as the liberal voter's alternative to Clinton, talking up his record on two key issues important to the party's liberal base: He reminded the crowd that he had gone out on a limb and endorsed gay marriage (before Obama), and that he and Obama had made good on their promise to end the war in Iraq.

Here's Cillizza and Sullivan:

Underscoring the administration's track record in Iraq would have been more difficult if the White House had still been pleading for congressional authorization to fire missiles at Syria, to punish the government there for a deadly chemical weapons attack in August. Biden was able to focus on the importance of diplomacy, making the threat of another war in the Middle East seem "almost like a faded memory," says David Catanese at The Daily Beast.

Still, there isn't a lot of ideological daylight between Clinton and Biden; they both voted to authorize force in Iraq, while Clinton came out in support of gay marriage shortly after Biden did. Furthermore, the two politicians, by most accounts, are as personally close as colleagues can be in the cutthroat world of Washington.

Indeed, Amy Chozick at The New York Times this weekend reported that Biden may have an entirely different motivation for hinting at a run: