What if Joe Biden had run and won? Sure, we wouldn't have our long-awaited first female president yet, but we would have...Joe Biden as president. Which would be pretty okay. Can you even imagine? I know, he would be just another white guy Democrat president in a long, long line of white guy Democrat presidents. But still. We would be living in such a pleasant, supportive, likely uneventful, and meme-filled 2017 — that fantasy really, really makes actual 2017 look like Gilead in comparison.
Apparently, even Biden himself is feeling nostalgia for the 2017 that never was. The Huffington Post Reports that the former vice president spoke at Colgate University in New York this weekend and explained that he regrets his decision not to run for president.
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“I had planned on running for president and although it would have been a very difficult primary, I think I could have won,” he said. “Maybe not, I don’t know.”
He added that his son, former Delaware attorney general Beau Biden, had urged him to run in 2016, but Joe thought his family had already been through enough. And when Beau died in 2015 after a battle with brain cancer, Joe "lost a part of my soul," he explained in his Colgate speech. He officially decided against running for president only a few months after Beau's death.
In the same speech, Biden applauded Hillary Clinton, calling her “extremely well qualified” to be president. But he also chronicled some of the mistakes that the Democrats made throughout the campaign — including not prioritizing working-class voters and spending too much time criticizing Trump's antics.
“Do I regret not being president? Yes,” he said. At least there's always 2020. And until then, Joe has some solid advice — for the Colgate students, and for all of us.
“Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts,” he said. Amen to that. "You can't remain silent... What we can't do is we can't play into the administration's game of getting us into this mosh pit. We can't allow ourselves to deal with them the same way they're dealing with us." Sounds like Joe and Michelle are on the same page — and so are we.
Watch Biden's full speech here.