Joe Biden’s Superpower Is Being Sane

It’s more important now than ever.

Joe Biden is a lot of things. He is from Delaware. He is proudly Irish. He is old-fashioned and milquetoast in a way that can be both a relief and infuritating. He is old — to many people, he is this more than he is anything else. But there is one thing that Joe Biden is that not even his (reasonable, earth-dwelling) detractors can deny: He is sane.

Joe Biden has been in public life for 50 years, since being elected to the United States Senate in 1972, at the age of 29 years old. That’s 50 years of being a person who is known nationally, and globally, as a Senator, as a Vice President and finally as the President of the United States. Fifty years of everyone looking at you, of knowing that every word you say will be scrutinized, of every twitch of your eyebrow analyzed for some sort of deeper meaning. We have had Joe Biden in our lives for our entire lives.

And there’s one thing we know about Joe Biden: He’s sane. We can argue about whether or not he’s as much of a “regular” guy as he likes to portray himself as, or whether he has his fastball like he might have had 20 years ago. But you simply could not have survived the last 50 years of public life being insane. We know he’s sane. We know he’s, as much as anyone who has been a politician for 50 years, normal.