Is former Vice President Joe Biden laying the groundwork for a 2020 run for President?
“I’ll be as straight with you as I can. I think I’m the most qualified person in the country to be president,” Biden told a crowd in Missoula, Montana, where he had stopped for a book tour event. “The issues that we face as a country today are the issues that have been in my wheelhouse, that I’ve worked on my whole life.”
“No one should run for the job unless they believe that they would be qualified doing the job,” he added. “I’ve been doing this my whole adult life, and the issues that are the most consequential relating to the plight of the middle class and our foreign policy are things that I have – even my critics would acknowledge, I may not be right but I know a great deal about it.”
Biden, who would be 78 when first inaugurated, would be by far the oldest person elected to the White House–but he’s younger than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is also considered a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.
Biden has already run for President twice: 1988, when he was forced to withdraw after repeatedly plagiarizing a speech from a British politician, and 2008, where he failed to receive any meaningful traction. Biden famously passed in 2016, due to the seemingly-inevitable win of Hillary Clinton and the fact that his son, Beau, had recently passed away.
In 2020, Biden claims he’ll make a final decision about whether to seek the White House again soon.
“I have two young grandchildren my son left who love me and adore me and want me around,” he explained. “I want to be there to take care of them, so we’ve got to figure out whether or not this is something we can all do as a family. We’re going to make that decision in the next six weeks to two months, and that’s the basis of the decision.”
