Joe Biden on Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders: 'I could live with either one of them'

Vice President Joe Biden shares his opinions on the democratic presidential candidates.

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images))

published 19 February 2016

Vice President Joe Biden says he could support either Hillary Clinton or Sen. Bernie Sanders as President Obama's successor. But he doesn't exactly seem thrilled with either option, at least in a recent interview with The Washington Post aboard Air Force Two.

"I could live with either of them," Biden said, after lamenting how neither candidate was emphasizing Obama's successful leadership on the economic recovery. "I could support either one of them. I just have a different political sense of how we should be talking about the issues that face us, to enhance the possibility that we keep the White House."

Biden says he largely agrees with the candidates' focuses — particularly Sanders' prioritization of economic inequality and big money's corrosive influence in politics — but he wishes they'd spend just a bit more time defending the Obama administration's legacy. The two Democratic candidates, he says, are "basically on the same page, with different emphasis, on almost all this stuff, from college to Wall Street to the 1 percent to civil rights, etc. What I don't think they spend enough time doing is pushing back on the storyline that what we did to get to this point was a failure or a mistake."