Hillary Clinton’s inability to connect with the country’s middle class likely cost her the presidential election, former Vice President Joe Biden suggested this week.
“What happened was that this was the first campaign that I can recall where my party did not talk about what it always stood for — and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class,” Biden told an audience at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, CNN reported.
“You didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making 60,000 bucks a year and a wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant,” he continued. “And they are making $90,000 and they have two kids and they can’t make it and they are scared, they are frightened.”
Biden’s remarks came at the launch event for the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement — his main post-vice presidency gig.
Biden said last week he thinks he had a good shot at becoming the Democrats’ presidential candidate.
“I had planned on running for president and although it would have been a very difficult primary, I think I could have won,” Biden told a Colgate University crowd last Friday. “I don’t know, maybe not. But I thought I could have won.”
“I had a lot of data and I was fairly confident that if I were the Democratic Party’s nominee, I had a better-than-even chance of being president,” he added. “But do I regret not being president? Yes. I was the best qualified.”