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Joe Biden Knocks Hillary Clinton, Says She Wasn’t The Correct Candidate In 2016

By Jackie Villegas
Published on: 02:46 PST, May 19, 2017

Former Vice President Joe Biden gave what might have been his harshest criticism of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during a speech at the SALT conference in Las Vegas on Thursday.

According to CNN, Biden was asked when it was that he realized Clinton was the correct candidate for the Oval Office in 2016.

“I never thought she was the correct candidate.”

Joe Biden might be criticizing his Democratic colleague now, but he did endorse the former secretary of state shortly after former President Barack Obama issued his own endorsement of her.

According to TheStreet, Biden’s comments about Hillary Clinton drew rounds of applause from the crowd at the SkyBridge Capital event on Thursday.

“No man or woman should announce for the presidency unless they genuinely believe that for that moment in the nation’s history they are the most qualified person to deal with the issues facing the country.”

This wasn’t the first time the former Vice President had criticized the Clinton campaign. He had previously lamented it’s lack of vision and rapport with working-class voters. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in December, Biden recalled watching footage of a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania and realizing, for the first time, that the Democrats could actually lose the election.

“They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”

Hillary Clinton did spend time speaking to middle-class voters during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, but her campaign seemed to focus more on why voters shouldn’t choose Donald Trump than on why they should choose her.

Speaking with the LA Times, Biden chimed in on the observations that Hillary Clinton had no real purpose for running for president.

“I don’t think she ever really figured it out.”

“And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run,” he added.

According to former Vice President Joe Biden, Clinton’s decision to run for president was not fueled by ambition or a hunger for power, but by a sense of duty.

“She thought she had no choice but to run. That, as the first woman who had an opportunity to win the presidency, I think it was a real burden on her.”

On Thursday, Biden emphasized that while he didn’t think Hillary Clinton was the right candidate, she would have been “a really good president.” He also said that he had someone else in mind as the Democratic nominee who should have taken on Donald Trump.

“I thought I was the correct candidate.”

Over the last year, Biden has expressed regrets for his decision not to run for the 2016 Democratic nomination. In March, he told a crowd at Colgate University that he thought he was the “best qualified” person for the role. With eight years as Vice President and nearly four decades as a Delaware senator under his belt, the presidency seemed the natural and inevitable next step for Joe Biden.

According to Variety, Biden told Colgate University president Brian W. Casey that he had planned on running for president and that he thought he could have won.

“I had a lot of data and I was fairly confident that if I were the Democratic Party’s nominee, I had a better than even chance of being president.”

In an interview on Good Morning America in May 2016, Joe Biden explained that he had decided not to enter the 2016 presidential race after his son, Beau Biden, died in May 2015 after a battle with cancer.

“No one should ever seek the presidency unless they’re able to devote their whole heart and soul and passion into just doing that. And, Beau was my soul. I just wasn’t ready to be able to do that.”

For now, as he revealed on Thursday, Biden is focused on family and on fulfilling some financial obligations, including paying off his mortgage. He would be nearly 78-years-old by the 2020 presidential election, but Biden said that he had not closed the door on the possibility of running.

[Featured Image by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images]

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