Just as Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate and a week before the Democrats’ virtual national convention is scheduled to begin, the basement strategy he’s been pursuing, hailed as the political equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes, was starting to look tattered and torn.

The basement strategy was an obvious choice during a pandemic for a 77-year-old candidate who was prone to slip-ups even in his prime, particularly against an incumbent president capable of stepping on his own best lines and tweeting himself into trouble and perhaps even more with a ticket-mate whose own presidential campaign showed her chronically unprepared and undisciplined.