In reading Original Sin, the blockbuster book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, I vividly remembered covering then-candidate Joe Biden when he came to my hometown in April 2019 to begin his run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

As someone who covered Biden for decades because he frequently visited the state in which he was born, I could not help but notice something was off — not in the way that would become apparent incrementally over the next five years, but he certainly was not the man who had jogged down Liberty Avenue in the Labor Day Parade four years earlier to chants of, “Run, Joe, run.”