Former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden said in a newly released interview with Vanity Fair that he has decided to keep the option of a 2020 presidential run open.
"I haven’t decided to run," the former Delaware senator said, "but I’ve decided I’m not going to decide not to run."
The interview comes a month after Biden's daughter said she believed he was planning to run. "If he is in good health, knock on wood, and seeing what the landscape is at the time, yeah, I think he is considering it," Ashley Biden opined.
Biden ran for president twice: in 1988 and again in 2008. As vice president, he flirted with the idea of running for president again in 2016, even though it would have pit him against his former Obama administration colleague Hillary Clinton.
In the end, he decided not to run, citing the need to process the death of his son Beau Biden to brain cancer.
The former vice president suggested to Vanity Fair that he would be concerned about the effect a presidential run would have on his family. "You don’t run by yourself. Your family is totally implicated. They become news; they become fodder," he said.
Vanity Fair pointed out that after the death of Beau, his widow entered into a relationship with Joe's other son Hunter Biden. Hunter has since divorced his wife.