“Someone once called Joe Biden the only 29-year-old underachiever ever elected to the United States Senate,” Paul Taylor wrote in his 1989 opus See How they Run. Biden, he noted, whose 1988 presidential run had ended in disaster, tended to confuse words with action.

Mary McGrory once described him as “a collection of good instincts and incoherent utterance, pleasant, energetic, but not in control.”