Joe Biden is still unsure about his White House ambitions, but the former vice president said in a new interview Wednesday his campaign would be far more cheerful than Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid if he does decide to run.
In his forthcoming book about the death of his 46-year-old son Beau, Biden admitted that he felt a “twinge of sadness” the day Clinton came to visit him at the vice president’s residence in Washington to let him know she planned to enter the 2016 presidential race.
“The sage political analysts would say she was probably on her way to a historic victory … but she did not evince much joy at the prospect of running,” Biden recalled, according to excerpts of the upcoming book obtained by Vanity Fair.
“I may have misread [Clinton] that morning, but she seemed to me like a person propelled by forces not entirely of her own making,” he continued.
Biden, a lifelong Democrat, had planned to seek his party’s presidential nomination in 2016 before the circumstances surrounding his son’s illness led him to change his mind.
He told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday that he would “find joy” in the endless time and effort it takes to run a successful presidential campaign should he decide to run in 2020. That, he said, would immediately set him apart from Clinton, who suffered an unexpected defeat last November.
“I think she was sort of a prisoner of history,” Biden said of the former secretary of state. “First woman who had a better-than-even chance of getting the nomination. First woman, relative to the Republican field, who had a better-than-even chance of being president.”
“But there’s a lot of baggage, fair and unfair, and there was no illusion on her part – this wasn’t going to be a Marquess of Queensberry fight,” he continued. “And I never got the sense that there was any joy in her campaign.”
The former vice president also said he has yet to make up his mind about challenging President Trump, and an ever-increasing batch of likely Democratic primary candidates.
“I haven’t decided to run, but I’ve decided I’m not going to decide not to run,” Biden told Vanity Fair. “We’ll see what happens.”
