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Biden jokes about 2016 presidential run. Is he serious?

Biden jokes about 2016 presidential bid in a phone conversation in Florida. Is this a Biden joke or is the veep serious about a 2016 run?

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(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Biden jokes about 2016: Vice President Joe Biden greets supporters after speaking at a campaign rally at the Municipal Auditorium in Sarasota, Fla., Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012.
  • By Mattew Daly Associated Press

| Sarasota, Fla.

Vice President Joe Biden is joking about running for president in 2016. Or is he?

During a visit to a Sarasota, Fla., restaurant on Wednesday, Biden took a customer's cellphone and engaged the man on the other end — apparently the customer's brother — in a lengthy discussion of the health care overhaul law.

After a while, Biden told the man, who seemed to be a Republican, that he wasn't going to argue with him to get his vote. Then Biden said: "After it's all over, when your insurance rates go down, then you'll vote for me in 2016."

Biden's campaign declined to comment on his remark or clarify his plans for 2016.

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The exchange followed a political rally in which Biden slammed a GOP ad on the auto industry as "flagrantly dishonest."

Biden is calling advertising released by Republican Mitt Romney "an outrageous lie" for asserting that automakers General Motors and Chrysler are adding jobs in China at the expense of workers in Ohio.

Biden says in Florida that Romney is "trying to scare the living devil" out of people who have been hurt by the loss of auto jobs in the past.

The ads are airing in Toledo, Ohio, the home of a Jeep plant run by Chrysler. Chrysler and GM officials have disputed the ads, calling them inaccurate.

President Barack Obama and Biden have touted their rescue of the two auto giants in 2009. The companies received billions of dollars from the government to go through bankruptcy and have recovered since the bailout, adding thousands of jobs.

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Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

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