Former Vice President Joe Biden said he regrets that he is not the president but said the decision not to run was right for his family.
“I regret that I am not president because I think there is so much opportunity,” Biden told Oprah Winfrey in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday. “I think America is so incredibly well-positioned.”
But Biden, who served under former President Obama for eight years, said he doesn’t have second thoughts about why he didn’t make a run for the White House.
“I don’t regret the decision I made because it was the right decision for my family,” he said.
The former senator from Delaware announced in October 2015, five months after the death of his 46-year-old son, Beau, from brain cancer, that he would not enter the Democratic presidential primary.
To run for office, Biden, 74, said a potential candidate has to answer two questions.
”One: Do they truly believe they are the most qualified person for that moment? I believed I was,” he said. “But, was I prepared to be able to give my whole heart, my whole soul and all my attention to the endeavor?
“I knew I wasn’t.”
He also recalled advice his mother gave him after his wife Nella and daughter Naomi were killed in an automobile accident just months after he was elected to the Senate in 1972.
“She said, ‘Joey grab my hand. … Out of everything horrible, something good will come if you look hard enough for it,'” he told Winfrey. “That was my mother’s notion. We were taught just to get up. When you get knocked down, just get up and move forward.”
He credits his parents for giving him the drive to go from a blue-collar upbringing in Scranton, Pa., to the halls of the Senate and eventually the White House.
“I wanted to live up to my parents’ expectations and I wanted to be that person that met my mother’s standard, being defined by my courage,” he said. “I wanted to be that person who, no matter what happened, just got back up and kept going. I wanted to be that person who was there and loyal to people who were loyal to him.”