Joe Biden on Thursday lamented the doom-and-gloom messages from 2016 candidates across the board--including from fellow Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who he said aren't doing enough to combat the idea that the country is in decline.

"I am surprised," he said in an interview with Politico and the Washington Post, referring to the overarching messages coming from the Clinton and Sanders campaigns.

"I think both Hillary and Bernie are basically on the same page, with different emphasis, on college, Wall Street, the 1%, civil rights, et cetera," he said. "What I don't think they're spending enough time doing is pushing back on the storyline that what we did to get us to this point was a failure and a mistake."

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As for why his fellow Democrats are buying into the gloomy tone, Biden replied: "The only thing I can figure is, they both have large campaign organizations, with a lot of smart people that are probably politically smarter than I am," he said. "They must say there's no way to sell a positive message. I don't know."

He said that in the 2014 midterms, the most successful Democratic candidates were ones who embraced the Obama administration--and that when it comes down to it, things aren't nearly as bad in the country as some candidates suggest.

"Look, this is totally, thoroughly objective: We are so much better positioned than anyone else in the world, for Christ's sake," he said. "It's not even close."

As for his own ambitions, does Biden wish he had run for president? In the interview, the vice president insisted he doesn't think he made the wrong choice.

"No--but I'm going to make my views known, and hopefully it will impact the nature of the debate within the Democratic Party," he said.

"It's not about either one of the candidates; I can live with either one of them. I can support either one of them," he continued. "I just have a different sense of how we should be talking about the issues that face us, to enhance the possibility that we keep the White House, and don't have everything we fought for all this time undone."

Biden also defended Sanders's core economic message as "mainstream," saying that even such "socialist" ideas as single-payer health care were initially positions that President Obama and Hillary Clinton also held.

"Look, what Bernie is talking about now is mainstream," he said. "The mainstream is saying wait a minute, the concentration of wealth is a disaster, and it's unfair. Full-blown capitalists are saying that's true, that's not right."