At a press conference this afternoon attended by President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden announced that he will not seek the Democratic nomination for president. Damn.

Biden said he spent months mulling the decision, which he said was complicated by the recent death of his son Beau.

“While I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent,” Biden said during the announcement, which sounded awfully like the stump speech that might have been. He later added that Democrats “should run” on Obama’s record, and he described what he hoped to accomplish if he’d decided to run and been elected.

“If I had done anything, I would have wanted to be the president that ended cancer,” he said. “Because it’s possible.”

Image via AP.