President Joe Biden served as eight years as vice president under former President Barack Obama but says in all that time, plus during his 30 years in the Senate, he had not been inside the presidential residence in the White House until he and his wife Jill moved in when he took office in January.
"I had been in the Oval Office a hundred times as vice president — more than that — every morning for the initial meetings, but I had never been up in the residence," Biden during a town hall event hosted by CNN's Anderson Cooper Tuesday night in Milwaukee, reports Fox News.
"You'd never been in the residence of the White House?" Cooper asked him.
"I'd only been upstairs in the Yellow Room, the Oval upstairs," Biden told him.
"I don't know, I've never been there either," Cooper said.
His disclosure appeared to support reports suggesting the relationship between Biden and Obama might not have been as close as it has been portrayed publicly.
Obama withheld his endorsement of Biden's presidential bid until last April after his former vice president had been campaigning for months and came out as the frontrunner. Further, a Politico report last August said Obama once warned about Biden that one should not "underestimate Joe's ability to f*** things up."
Biden on Tuesday night also said he has not had the experience of having a White House staff available to address all his needs, and it has made him feel "self-conscious" because he was "raised in a way that you didn't look for anybody to wait on you."
He also told Cooper his experience living in the White House this past month has been different than he thought it would be.
"I said when I was running, I wanted to be president, not to live in the White House, but to be able to make the decisions about the future of the country," Biden said. "So living in the White House — as you've heard [from] other presidents who've been extremely flattered to live there — it's a little like a gilded cage in terms of being able to walk outside and do things."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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