US President Joe Biden rides his bike through Gordons Pond State Park in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. (Image: AFP)
Biden said when he became the US President he was a transitional president.
US President Joe Biden admitted that members of the Democratic Party felt that if he ran for the White House it would hurt the party’s chances of winning.
He also indicated that Nancy Pelosi could have been one of the people who may have pushed Democrats to ask Biden to step out of the White House race.
“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic — you’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say [something] … and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning in his first interview since dropping out of the White House race.
Biden had endorsed US Vice President Kamala Harris soon after he dropped out of the White House race.
He said the key priority of the election is to “maintain this democracy” while saying that his predecessor Donald Trump is a threat to the US.
Biden said he was proud of his record on jobs, investment and Covid recovery — and vowed to campaign hard for Vice President Kamala Harris, who has replaced him on the ballot.
“I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most,” he said.
Democrats’ hopes of winning have soared since Biden’s withdrawal, as Harris enjoys a surge in support that has left Trump and the Republicans struggling.
The outgoing president said he had expected to serve only one term when he won in 2020, but that he had been persuaded to push for a second.
“I thought of myself as being a transition president — I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth — but things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen,” he told CBS’s Robert Costa.
