Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that Bernie Sanders has failed to offered a satisfactory explanation of how he plans to fulfill his campaign promises.
Biden told CNBC that Sanders has raised legitimate issues, but hasn’t met the vice president’s appetite for specific solutions.
“When you hear [Sanders] say Dodd-Frank didn’t go far enough, break up the banks; not just free community college, free college; bigger tax increases, bigger programs — is that just campaign talk that can’t possibly be realized?” CNBC’s John Harwood asked.
“No, it can be. It can be. But what I don’t see enough of is the explanation of how to do that,” Biden said. “But I do think that Bernie has raised a very legitimate issue that has consequences beyond the way Bernie talks about it. We have maybe 24 percent, 24.1 percent of all the income in America earned by 1 percent of the people. That hasn’t happened since 1922, I believe.”
Biden also bristled at the perception of him as “Goofy Uncle Joe” as vice president.
“The so-called Goofy Uncle Joe — if you notice, I beat every Republican in every poll when they thought I was running,” Biden said. “You notice that my favorability was higher than anybody that’s running for office in either party.”
After Biden decided not to run for president, he has largely avoided becoming part of the discussion surrounding the 2016 Democratic presidential race. His talk about his poll numbers and tentative criticism of Sanders comes one week before his home state of Delaware votes in the Democratic primary.
