Wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses, Vice President Joe Biden visits a mall in Las Vegas with senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto. | AP Photo Biden doesn't like being called 'Goofy Uncle Joe'

For Joe Biden, the moniker “Goofy Uncle Joe" has got to go.

“I'm not comfortable with Goofy Uncle Joe,” the vice president told CNBC’s John Harwood in an interview that published Tuesday. “But one of the things that's important to know — and one of the reasons why, when I first got asked about this job I said no — is there is no inherent power in being vice president.”


The question came as Harwood asked Biden whether he felt any sympathy for his predecessors and the characterizations that have dogged their public perception, such as "weak" for George H.W. Bush, "dumb" for Dan Quayle, "wooden" for Al Gore and "Darth Vader" for Dick Cheney.

But that power struggle hasn’t been the case under President Barack Obama, Biden said.

He recalled that when the president was trying to convince him to be vice president he asked Biden, “’What do you want?’ I said, ‘I want to be the last guy in the room.’ Every assignment he's given me, I've not had to check back. I ran the Recovery Act — beginning, middle and end. I did the Iraq thing.”

And Biden – who considered running for president in 2016 before deciding against it last October – had one more point of pride.

“And by the way, the so-called Goofy Uncle Joe — if you notice, I beat every Republican in every poll when they thought I was running,” he said. “You notice that my favorability was higher than anybody that's running for office in either party."