On the second night of the Democratic convention, Joe Biden, a longtime family friend of the McCains, has earned the de facto backing of McCain matriarch Cindy, who has narrated a video featuring the famous friendship between the Arizona senator and the Democratic nominee, who spent decades serving alongside John McCain while representing Delaware.

The McCains embody a generation of what the GOP once believed in. For worse, their detractors point toward the military hawkishness of McCain and his allies. For the undeniably better, their fans point toward McCain’s unadulterated decency, his commitment both to his country as an abstract concept, for which he paid with his body and freedom as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and to his fellow countryman, exemplified by his insistent refutations of allegations that Barack Obama, then his presidential challenger, was somehow less American or less deserving of the Oval Office.