Biden’s incompetence was concealed by a 2020 campaign that first pitted him against a weak field of Democrats attempting to out-“woke” one another, and then against a uniquely chaotic and divisive president—during a global pandemic. This allowed Biden to succeed without having to demonstrate competence or by earning much of a proactive mandate.

Indeed, the answer to the competence question and the message question both boiled down to saying, “I’m not Trump!” This worked out well in the campaign, but it has not been an effective governing strategy. Sadly, though, his failure to govern effectively was somewhat predictable, and foreshadowed by Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988.

As David Sessions wrote in The New Republic last year, there is “no evidence of Biden ever having had an ideology in the sense of a coherent, historically grounded political worldview. In Biden’s own telling, politics as packaging and profession appealed to him from a very young age; inspired by John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president, the young Biden famously looked up politicians’ biographies to find out how they got where they were.”

We’re left with a troubling question: What if Joe Biden was never really all that good?