Biden refuses to rule out 2020 for the 3rd time in a week

(Image credit: CBS)

published 11 December 2016

For the third time since Monday, Vice President Joe Biden refused to rule out the possibility of a presidential run in 2020 in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper that aired Sunday.

"Four years is a lifetime in American politics," Biden said. "And I think nominees are determined by their parties based mostly on what skill set is most needed at that time. And who knows where we're going to be two years from now, when people are really starting to look seriously at what they're going to do." The outgoing veep previously said 2020 might be on the table Monday after a Senate session and Tuesday on Stephen Colbert's Late Show.

The conversation with Tapper also covered the 2016 election — "the most vicious campaign, the craziest campaign, I’ve ever witnessed" — and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), President-elect Donald Trump's attorney general nominee. In 1986, Biden refused to support Sessions' nomination to a federal judgeship on the grounds that Sessions had made racist remarks, but 30 years later, he told Tapper that though he "wouldn't have appointed Jeff," people can learn and change.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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