Former Vice President Joe Biden indicated he’s flirting with the idea of running for president in 2020, while stressing “we’ve got a lot of talented people in the Democratic Party, and I’m looking for some of these guys to come along” instead.
“Barack, the president, asked me all during the end of the last administration, you know, how do you make the judgment? If I can look in the mirror in 2 1/2, two years, and walk away knowing I’m not walking away because I’m afraid or I don’t have the nerve to try to do the job or I don’t want to make the effort, then I’ll happily walk away for real. And there’s a lot of new folks potentially coming up here,” Biden told CNN in an interview aired Tuesday.
“You know, we didn’t know who Bill Clinton was three years out. We didn’t know who Barack Obama was other than that tremendous speech he made. And they stepped up. They stepped up,” he added. “And so, — but I know one thing. We have to reclaim the essence of who we are as a country. We have to just get rid of this dangerous and, in terms of our security, dangerous notion of nationalism, and we’ve got to get rid of this phony populism that just is creating space for people to grab power.”
Biden is currently 75 years old; President Trump is 71. The former VP just published a memoir about his late son, Beau: “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”
To win, he said, the Democratic Party has to meet the challenge “to step up and offer concrete answers, which we’re doing.”
“For example, when we talk about, you know, the plight of the working class, well, you know, one of the plights is the cost of education, the cost of daycare, the cost of being able to care for your kid,” he added. “…If you just eliminated one that cost $17 billion, I could put every single qualified kid in America who qualifies into community college for free, for free. Cutting the cost of four-year college in half, it would cost $6 billion a year and I can reduce the deficit by $11 billion.”
Biden rejected the idea that he’s too centrist in a party that’s moving to the left.
“I don’t think you have to choose between your heart and your soul. If you go back and look at my record of 36 years in the Senate, I was rated one of the most liberal senators in the United States Senate during that 36-year period. I’m the guy that spoke out on same-sex marriage and a whole range of other things. I take a back seat to no one on being progressive,” he said. “I found no distinction between being able to be progressive and worrying about working-class people, middle-class people. They are not inconsistent.”
“And to make the point, in the last campaign, I went to a factory up in Ohio, a Ford factory, and I started off and said, let me tell you something. We have to elect — and I went on and said here’s the deal. Every woman’s entitled to make the same pay a man makes for the same job. All these blue collar guys went nuts. You know why? If their wife got paid the same for selling shoes the man sells shoes in the same place, they get to put four new tires on their car. They get to get a new faucet. They get to make sure they’re able to pay their insurance,” Biden continued.
“I said, look, it doesn’t matter. It’s none of your business who somebody marries. None of your business. They cheered. Three thousand guys cheered. Just don’t tell them they have to live that lifestyle,” he noted. “It’s anybody’s — and any man that raises his hand to a woman is a coward. They went nuts because they got daughters and wives. We forget that these are the people I came from, not just me, almost everybody. I mean middle-class folks were decent, honorable, and the thing that we have to do is we have to start looking at them and acknowledging and treating them with dignity. It’s the job they do that we have to begin to honor. Anyway, it just drives me nuts.”
Biden insisted that “the American people are better than their leadership is now across the board.”
“And we just have to give them a chance. You give them a chance,” the vice president said. “They’ve never let the country down. And so, from my perspective, I spend all my time — and I give you my word. I spend all my time sighing that we elect a Democratic House and have chance to elect in the Senate to stop this insanity and begin to right this ship again. And that’s what I’m focused on, and I really mean that.”
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