A sombre President Biden has given his first face-to-face interview since he dramatically withdrew from Democrat election ticket and handed the reins to his Vice President Kamala Harris.
In an enlightening interview the the 81-year-old current leader of the free world admitted he “can’t even say how old I am” as he spoke candidly with CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa.
The President, who dropped out of the race for the White House last month, said he had initially considered himself a “transition President” after beating Donald Trump at the last election.
But he added: “I can’t even say how old I am, it’s hard for me to get it outta my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”
The Democrat politician represented Delaware in the US Senate from 1973 to 2009 before serving as vice president under Barack Obama until 2017.
President Biden added that his decision was not based on public opinion because the polls were “neck-and-neck”.
He made this assertion despite a number of high-profile poor performances in the campaign before he stepped down, most notably in his televised debate with Trump and his mistake at a NATO event when he called President Zelensky of Ukraine, President Putin.
The President continued: “But what happened was, a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna 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…’ ‘Why did so-and-so…’ And I thought it’d be a real distraction, number one.”
This weekend Vice President Kamala Harris vowed that, if elected, she’d eliminate federal taxes on tips paid to restaurant workers and scores of other service employees, echoing a pledge already made by Donald Trump.
Harris made the announcement at a rally on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the economy relies heavily on the hotel, restaurant and entertainment industries.
Trump made a similar promise at his own rally in the city in June, though neither he nor Harris are likely to be able to fully do that without actions from Congress.
