Even at his best, Biden was notorious for being loopy, digressive, and sloppy, and he’s long past his best. Clarence Thomas noted of Biden’s line of questioning during his Senate confirmation hearings, “You have to sit there and look attentively at people [who] you know have no idea what they are talking about.” His bizarre 2012 debate with Paul Ryan consisted of bursts of strangely out-of-context laughter and boorish interruptions. His own aides panic every time he goes off-script, to such a degree that David Axelrod once quipped that Biden was being kept in a “candidate-protection program.” When he starts riffing, he is given to making false claims such as that he was arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. His answer to all questions in debate is a subject, a verb, and Obama.

Moreover, Biden looks moderate only in the context of the insanity that is gripping the Democratic Party, only by comparison to wackadoodles such as Warren and Sanders. He has so far escaped scrutiny for the implications of his policy proposals, such as a “public option” for health insurance that would inevitably destroy the private insurance market. He was specifically asked whether this could happen by the New York Times and replied, “Bingo. . . . Sure they would.” He blithely said that when employer-based private health insurance dies out, people could simply go on “the Biden plan.” His health-care policy is just a slo-mo version of Sanders’s and Warren’s policy. He has called for massive tax hikes, offered public health care for illegal immigrants, said such immigrants should not be deported if they’re convicted of drunk driving, and endorsed the $93 trillion boondoggle known as the Green New Deal.