Joe Biden said Friday he thinks he could have beaten President Donald Trump in a presidential run in 2016, and he regrets not being president.
Biden, who served eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama, made the comments at Colgate University during the Kerschner Family Series Global Leaders with university president Brian Casey, the Auburn Citizen reported.
"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," Biden said during the event, according to the Citizen.
Biden admitted, though that he "lost part of my soul" when his son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, calling him the "the finest man I've ever known in my life," stated the newspaper.
Joseph "Beau" Biden III, had served as Delaware attorney general and was an Iraq War veteran before dying of cancer, CNN reported. He had suffered a stroke in 2010 before being diagnosed with brain cancer in 2013.
"The press began to think I was playing a game, but I couldn't tell them about my boy," Biden told the Colgate audience, according to The Washington Post. "He wanted me to run. … My son Hunter, my daughter Ashley, my wife, all thought I should. I didn't. At the end of the day, I just couldn't do it."
Biden, who first won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1972, had run for president during the Democratic primary in 2008, but dropped out of the race early and was selected by Obama to be his vice president.
"No man or woman should announce for president of the United States unless they can look the public in the eye and say, 'I promise you I am giving 100 percent of my attention and dedication to this effort,'" Biden said Friday at Colgate, the Post noted.
"Do I regret not being president? Yes. Do I regret not running for president, in light of everything that was going on in my life at the time? No," Biden continued.
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