Former Vice President Joe Biden complimented 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Thursday despite campaigning against him 17 years ago and accusing him of suppressing minority votes.
“You were a hell of a governor,” Biden, a 2020 Democratic hopeful, said to the former Florida governor, who was first elected in 1998 and reelected four years later.
Bush, 66, and Biden, 76, who has been teasing a 2020 presidential run for months, appeared at a University of Pennsylvania forum to discuss the opioid epidemic. Biden’s praise for Republicans has already got him in trouble once this spring. He felt he had to apologize for describing Vice President Mike Pence as “a decent guy.”
In 2002, Jeb Bush was opposed by Bill McBride, the Democratic nominee. Biden campaigned for McBride then and even suggested that Bush had been involved in denying the vote to blacks in 2000. “It’s not just a big deal because the whole world, not the whole nation, the whole world, looked at how many people of color were disenfranchised last time,” he told congregants in a Baptist church near Miami. “It’s a big deal because everything we stand for in this church is at stake.”
This week, Bush and Biden were like best friends, speaking at an event alongside Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, who faces a Democratic primary election next month to secure a second term in office.
Bush recommended running for president. “My ill-fated run for president, which I recommend people do that if they’re thinking about it … I was talking about the mayor,” Bush said over laughs from the audience. Biden, who has run for president twice already, in 1988, when he dropped out in the early stages after a plagiarism scandal, and in 2008, when he secured just 1% of the vote in Iowa, responded: “Speaking of addiction.”
Bush and Biden are both currently presidential practice professors at the Ivy League college.
The 47th vice president was seen earlier this month with a camera crew in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., and was assumed to be filming an announcement video.
