Joe Biden once said that his youth allowed him to win his first run for the Senate because he was like the “token” African-American or female.
“I’m like the token black or the token woman. I was the token young person,” Biden said in a 1974 PBS debate uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon.
Biden said that he was able to raise $276,000 in that 1972 race because he was a young man.
“I’m a 29-year-old oddball,” Biden said. “The only reason I was able to raise the money is that I was able to have a national constituency to run for office, because I was 29.”
Biden said that he tried to “prostitute” himself for money but was denied by the big guys because of his youth, though he believed his age was what ultimately led to his victory.
“You run the risk of deciding whether or not you’re going to prostitute yourself to give the answer you know they want to hear in order to get funded to run for that office,” Biden said during the program “The Advocates.”
“I went to the big guys for the money,” Biden continued. “I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it, but what happened was they said, ‘Come back when you’re 40, son.'”
Biden served as a Delaware senator from 1973 to 2009 before becoming vice president to the United States’ first black president, Barack Obama.
Now 76, Biden is considering a run for the White House himself in 2020. He apologized Tuesday for not doing more for Anita Hill when she testified before his committee in 1991, alleging she had been sexually harassed by then-nominee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas.
Biden, who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it was unfair that Hill had to testify before “a bunch of white guys” who didn’t “fully understand” her perspective.
If Biden throws his hat in the ring, he will face an already-crowded Democratic primary with more than a dozen candidates competing for the party’s nomination.
