President Joe Biden’s town hall in Milwaukee revealed some integral facts about his economic plans for America and some little-known facts about his time as vice president.
Biden answered a number of questions from the attendees and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who recently hosted the cable news station’s town hall. One major takeaway from the Q&A forum was that the president would not support canceling $50,000 in student loan debt because he said he didn’t believe he had “the authority to do that.”
Though that response yielded some disappointment from viewers, another detail about his eight years as vice president might’ve slipped under the radar for some. Cooper, turning the page on the student loan debt comment, asked the president about how it feels to live in the White House.
Biden, responding with a slight smirk, said: “I wake up every morning, look at Jill and say, ‘Where the hell are we?”
The audience laughed at his response. Biden, who served as vice president and in the U.S. Senate for 30 years, said in his short time as president it dawned on him that he had never been in the private area of the White House. He had attended dozens of meetings with other dignitaries in public sections at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I had been in the Oval Office a hundred times as vice president— more than that ― every morning for the initial meetings, but I had never been up in the residence,” Biden said.
“You’d never been in the residence of the White House?” Cooper asked, sounding taken aback by the response.
“I’d only been upstairs in the Yellow Room, the Oval upstairs,” Biden said.
That disclosure would suggest that former President Barack Obama had not previously invited his second-in-command to his residence for personal or private conversation, which some considered odd.
The two worked together for eight years, and the former president hit the campaign trail for Biden once he was selected as the Democratic presidential nominee. The casual disclosure led to some speculation about the nature and closeness of the two most recent Democratic presidents’ relationship.
The president has not made any follow-up comments regarding his time at the White House during his vice presidency. However, he told Cooper that his living arrangements were low on his priority list when he ran for president.
“You know, I don’t know what I ever expected it to be. It is different in that, um — [I don’t want to] get in trouble here — I said when I was running, I wanted to be president not to live in the White House but to be able to make the decisions about the future of the country.
“So living in the White House — as you’ve heard [from] other presidents who’ve been extremely flattered to live there — it’s a little like a gilded cage in terms of being able to walk outside and do things.”
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