Vice President Joe Biden reiterated that the reason he isn’t running for president is because he doesn’t think he could win, not because he didn’t want to run.
Sitting next to his wife, Jill, in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, Biden said if he thought he could have ran a winning campaign, he “would have gone ahead and done it.”
“It’s the right decision for the family, it’s the right decision for us,” Biden concluded, whose decision revolved around his family’s readiness to take on the stress of a presidential campaign so soon after the death of his son Beau.
Beau Biden died in May at the age of 46 after a battle with brain cancer.
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Jill Biden admitted that she is disappointed her husband is not running for president. She said she has seen the strength of his character, optimism and hope.
“I believed he would’ve been the best president,” she said.
But the vice president said running for office is not in his future, even after the 2016 elections.
He went on to discuss parts of his speech last week that some inferred were directed at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, including when he said, “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies.”
“That wasn’t directed at Hillary,” he said. “That was a reference to Washington. All of Washington.”
Clinton jokingly said Republicans were among the enemies she is most proud of making in the Democratic debate on Oct. 13.
In his speech, Biden also said Democrats should run on President Barack Obama’s record, which he would have done if he ran. Clinton is not running on all of Obama’s record, he said in the interview.
“She’ll run on part of it,” Biden said. “It doesn’t mean she won’t be a great president.”
Clinton recently opposed Obama on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she said doesn’t appear to meet the bar she has set.
Biden said he his friends with Clinton, and did not admit to be attacking her. Speaking about the GOP front-runner, however, he said he is “disappointed in Donald Trump,” specifically regarding the business mogul’s position on immigration.
“I really don’t think it’s healthy and I hope he reconsiders this sort of attack on all immigrants,” Biden said. “I think that is beneath the country. I don’t think it’s where the American people are. And I hope he really doesn’t believe it.”
Nicole Brown