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.

I’d argue there’s no better attribute for a President to have, right now, at this specific moment, than being sane. Biden knows this. And he’s taking full advantage of it.

Much has been written about how Biden seemed to have specifically constructed his State of the Union address on Tuesday night so that loons like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Lee and company would hoot and holler at him. But I think this worked not just because they reacted so crazily. It worked because people do not want this.

This is a point so obvious that the noise and clatter of everyday life almost makes us forget to keep repeating it: People do not want insane people in charge. I would argue, for the average person, it’s the single most important trait for a government official: Don’t be crazy. We may not trust you. We may not like some of the things you stand for. We may think it’s weird that you want to be in public life in the first place…