WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden says he decided against running for president because he “couldn’t win,” not because he would have had too little time to get a campaign up and running.

“I’ll be very blunt. If I thought we could’ve put together the campaign … that our supporters deserve and our contributors deserved, … I would have done it,” he said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

The vice president also said he would not have gotten into the race just to stop Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“I’ve said from the beginning, ‘Look, I like Hillary. Hillary and I get along together,” he said. “The only reason to run is because … I still think I could do a better job than anybody else could do.”

He used the interview to play down suggestions his announcement not to run, made at the White House on Wednesday with President Obama at his side, included a jab at Clinton.

At the White House event, Biden lamented partisan bickering in Washington politics and said, “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies.” Clinton had made a statement to that effect during the Democratic presidential debate earlier this month.

“That wasn’t directed at Hillary,” Biden told “60 Minutes.” “That was a reference to Washington, all of Washington,” he said.