Second, it’s tough to build a winning campaign on a rationale that everybody knows is false. Biden has marketed his potential presidency as a return to prelapsarian America, a time before President Trump when senators of both parties could knock the hell out of each other during the day, go get beers after work, and then hash out a deal the next day that everybody could live with. Just elect Biden, and an era of bipartisan comity will reign one again. “I just think there is a way, and the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” Biden said last spring.

That almost certainly won’t happen — and Biden, who served as vice president to Barack Obama, should know it better than anybody. Republicans dedicated themselves to complete obstructionism during the Obama administration on the theory it would benefit them electorally. They were right. Which means there will be little or no incentive for them to play ball with a Biden administration, and everybody who has paid the least bit of attention to politics in the 21st century understands that. The Democratic nominee will need a plan for how to govern in the face of that obstructionism, and Biden doesn’t really have such a plan — he offers himself instead. It’s not enough.