The Slatest

Cheney “Disturbed” by Biden’s Debate Performance

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney speaks at the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute Cardiovascular Symposium in April

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Former vice president Dick Cheney said he found Vice President Joe Biden’s behavior at the debate Thursday night “very disturbing,” adding that it was “the most emotionally unstable debate performance in modern American politics,” reports Mediaite.

George W. Bush’s vice president phoned in to Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Friday and outright questioned whether Biden had the right temperament to serve as president, noting that he “is not the type of personality I’d like to see in the Oval Office.” Cheney said that when he was at the White House and met with lawmakers, then-senator Biden would “talk longer than anybody else did” and “interrupt other people and just sort of butt in like he did last night,” according to the Hill’s account.

The most important trait for a vice president is “the ability to step in a a moment’s notice and take over,” Cheney said. “And you want somebody calm, cool, and collected, who asks questions and seeks good information and makes life-or-death decisions that we pay a president to take for all of us.”

Biden, Cheney added, does not have “the kind of personality I would like to see in the Oval Office.”