Washington: It’s more than a month before President-elect Donald Trump even enters the White House, but US Vice-President Joe Biden says he’s running for President in 2020. Maybe.
“I’m going to run in 2020. For President. So, uh, what the hell man,” the departing Vice-President told reporters on Monday with only a slight smile on his face. Given a chance to walk it back, he did — but only a bit.
Asked if he was joking, Biden said: “I’m not committing not to run. I’m not committing to anything. I learned a long time ago, fate has a strange way of intervening.”
Mr Biden, who turned 74 last month, will turn 78 shortly after the 2020 election. Former US President Ronald Reagan was just a few days short of turning 78 when he left office in January 1989, making him the oldest person to serve as President.
The Vice-President decided to not seek the White House in 2015 and instead backed this year’s eventual Democratic President-ial nominee, Hillary Clinton. He ran unsuccessfully for his party’s nomination in 2008, when now-President Barack Obama selected him as his running mate, and in 1988. Mr Biden was asked about his plans while chatting with reporters after presiding over the Senate debate on a biomedical research bill he is supporting.
A senator for 36 years before becoming Vice-President, Mr Biden was emotional after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a friend, got the Senate to name a portion of the measure after Mr Biden’s son, Beau, who died of cancer in 2015.
Shortly after Mr Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, his first wife and year-old daughter died in a car crash.
