Former vice-president said he will decide in the next two months if he will run in 2020 but acknowledged he is a ‘gaffe machine’

Former vice-president Joe Biden has said he is the “most qualified person” to be president and will soon make up his mind about whether to run in 2020.

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Speaking in Missoula, Montana, on Monday as part of his book tour, Biden said he would decide in the next two months. The man who ran for the 1988 and 2008 Democratic nominations also acknowledged a potential weakness: that he’s a “gaffe machine”.

“I’ll be as straight with you as I can,” Biden said. “I think I’m the most qualified person in the country to be president. The issues that we face as a country today are the issues that have been in my wheelhouse, that I’ve worked on my whole life.”

He added: “No one should run for the job unless they believe that they would be qualified doing the job. I’ve been doing this my whole adult life, and the issues that are the most consequential relating to the plight of the middle class and our foreign policy are things that I have … even my critics would acknowledge, I may not be right but I know a great deal about it.”

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Biden was a senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, when he became vice-president to Barack Obama. He ran briefly for president in 1987, dropping out after it became clear he had plagiarised a speech by the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock.

This time, he said, he would decide with his family.

“I have two young grandchildren and my son left who love me and adore me and want me around,” Biden said. “I want to be there to take care of them, so we’ve got to figure out whether or not this is something we can all do as a family,” he said. “We’re going to make that decision in the next six weeks to two months, and that’s the basis of the decision.”

Biden’s book, Promise Me, Dad, is about the death of his son, Beau Biden, in 2015, at the age of 46.

On Tuesday, two billionaires among the least three dozen possible Democratic candidates who have flirted with running for president were visiting two important primary states.

Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who only recently became a registered Democrat, was set to visit three towns in Iowa. The investor and climate activist Tom Steyer, perhaps best known as the face of a well-funded effort to impeach Donald Trump, was to host a town hall in Charleston, South Carolina.

Both men spent millions funding Democratic candidates in the midterms, an effort which achieved control of the House and a number of state-level wins.