Joe Biden: Being vice president's a 'b----'

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 3 (UPI) -- Joe Biden, responding to a Harvard student who said he was vice president of a campus group, suggested being vice president is a "bitch."

The vice president of the United States spoke Thursday evening at the Harvard Institute of Politics, and expressed sympathy for his fellow veep.

"Isn't it a bitch? I mean ... that vice president thing," Biden said.

Biden, who went from being one of the youngest senators in U.S. history in 1972 to one of the most senior in the upper house when he was elected vice president in 2008, is known for occasionally salty language and blunt talk -- sometimes described as gaffes.

On Thursday, he went on to say that becoming President Obama's running mate was "the best decision" he has made.

"I love that guy I work with," Biden said.

Vice presidents, often selected for political reasons, have sometimes had a difficult time. John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, vice president during Franklin Roosevelt's first two terms, famously said the office was not "worth a bucket of warm spit," and the 1930s musical Of Thee I Sing showed a vice president who had to take a guided tour to see the inside of the White House.

Since Roosevelt's final vice president, Harry Truman, only learned the United States was close to developing an atomic bomb after he became president, there has been more of an effort to keep vice presidents in the loop. Biden, first elected to the Senate when Obama was a child, is believed to have had a strong influence, especially in foreign policy.