Joe Biden prevailed Thursday. 

The 78-year-old former vice president and longtime Delaware senator summited a peak he’d long plotted climbing: he accepted the Democratic nomination for president. “I’m a proud Democrat,” a smiling Biden remarked. “And I’ll be proud to carry the banner of our party into the general election.”

A word on that.

Biden’s emphasis on his own partisanship has ratcheted up as this campaign has gone on, as it is perhaps his singular consistency over a long, logorrheic, unmoored career. Biden is a Democrat, and has always been. 

It’s an understandable emphasis. The Republican Party is still successfully lampooned as the party of the rich— and some of those who insist otherwise are apparently indicted for fraud—even as corporate America endorses what amount to anti-Trump shock troops in the country’s streets. Forty-seven percent of American singles would not consider dating a person who voted for Donald Trump; twenty-seven percent would not open their hearts to a Republican—this according to a miserable new survey from Pew. 

The Democrats have quietly become the best brand in America, a hallucinatory turn of events for anyone who remembers the 1990’s and 2000’s in this country. The liberals, went the conventional wisdom, could only triumph if they trojan-horsed their ideals through a Southern, white male. Think Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Al Gore (who did win the popular vote). Hence, the fascination among political handicappers with figures such as moderate Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who captured the mansion in the then-conservative Old Dominion. Or, the political ascendancy of John Edwards, a Dixie twist on JFK. Even Hillary Clinton (who everyone knows can turn on a twang), in 2008, tried to court the white working class in a last-ditch effort to stave off Barack Obama. 

This dynamic was no panacea. Respectable members of the liberal Left, supported by the founders of this magazine, tried to warn us about the crusade in Iraq, only to be demonized as dangerous fifth columnists for France, or jihad, or whatever. It is, of course, fascinating that many of those howlers are now the advance guard for Democratic victory, after running the most ruinous Republican administration in American history. 

The last period of Democratic dominance—2006 to 2010—was built on a broad, and I would submit, healthy coalition for the country. Jim Webb, associated with this magazine, gave the 2007 State of the Union response to George W. Bush. “Blue dog” Democrats were the “backbone,” as Biden might say, of a brilliant repositioning of the Democratic party concocted by Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer in the 2006 midterms, and then by Obama in the 2008 presidential elections. For all the discussion of white backlash, and Republicans never giving the 44th president a chance, it’s important to remember Obama won Indiana—the state that would send America Mike Pence eight years later. The Democrats’ dominance was utter and near complete. And they deserved it.

***

“No. Never, never, never,” Biden told Wired on having ever been a Republican earlier this year. Tying the events of this moment to today, Biden noted: “My city was occupied by the National Guard, because Dr. [Martin Luther] King had been assassinated,” before continuing, “the Democratic Party at the time was much more conservative than the Republican Party. So, I couldn’t bring myself to register a Republican—because I wasn’t big on Richard Nixon. So, I registered as an independent. But shortly thereafter, I helped change the Democratic Party to be a mainstream Democratic Party.” 

Except this maybe isn’t true. 

Biden is widely quoted as having “thought of himself as a Republican” (without apparent refutation) long into his twenties. He clerked for the firm of noted Republican lawyer William Prickett. It was only in the few years before his astonishing ascent to the Senate—elected at twenty-nine—did he really become a Democrat. He served on city council; always hurting for cash, he managed properties; before that, he got C’s and D’s. 

This isn’t to say he isn’t capable. That would be spectacularly untrue. He’s likely the next president, born of middle-class Irish stock from Scranton, which has seen a hard half-century. He’d be the first president sans Ivy League degree since Reagan. He’s from a state most are familiar with zooming past on their way to New York. He’s perhaps not “Abraham Lincoln of California,” as Don Draper said of Richard Nixon, but in the age of “meritocratic” cartel, he’s as close to a self-made man in the upper echelon of politics as we’ve got. 

And like Nixon, Biden has spent a lifetime as a man divided against himself, tormented by doubters. Gary Wills in the seminal Nixon Agonistes posited, persuasively, that Nixon was actually a liberal. Biden is, perhaps, his proper opposite: a modern Democrat who has dabbled in the reactionary. Biden, in a quip could have been lifted from some of the less diplomatic corners of the internet, bemoaned forty years ago that without “orderly integration” the country would descend into “racial jungle.” Like Nixon, he’s a (formerly) failed presidential candidate whose whole rise screams “transition” into a more ideological future. And one who, for a time, might become surprisingly dominant.

The Democratic nominee for president is as talented a shapeshifter as they come. He captains a Democratic ship that has openly, nakedly moved past him. It hasn’t mattered. That speaks to Biden’s power and skill—and his alone. Though former vice presidents, in modern history, are rarely denied their party’s nomination if they seek it, few gave him a chance, least of all the commanding heights of his own party. Though they both tout their friendship, we know that Barack Obama, his old boss, connived against him for the better part of a decade, flirting with a ticket switch in 2012, clearing the field for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then throwing out names few had previously ever heard of (Pete Buttigieg) over Biden. 

He authored a landmark crime bill, but is on the precipice of unrivaled power in the year of Black Lives Matter. He helped re-write the bankruptcy laws only fifteen years ago—lining the pockets of his corporate stronghold home state—only to later cross the line and all but endorse the plan of his most trenchant critic in those years, Elizabeth Warren. He’s a cartographer, seem to ever visit new territory on the political map.  

This is why it was so surprising, to me anyway, to see him preside over a cynical, lo-fi and factional convention. Biden’s speech last night was pablum, refusing to present his compelling personal story as part and parcel of a history of crossing the aisle. He emphasized empathy, but showed little of his own, even as, despite everything, scores of Americans support Donald Trump. As someone who so often changed his mind, he could have delved, compellingly, into the minds of others; he would know. Like the selection of his running mate, he played it really “safe.” 

“A wise man… once said that if you want to assess a political speech, watch with the sound turned off. By that standard, Biden looks pretty good,” Sam Goldman at George Washington University remarked. “This is just not a very good speech,” Zach Carter at Huffington Post countered. “Let’s not kid ourselves about what is going on here. This was a pretty dull convention that offered the country nothing other than Trump will be gone.” If he intended to offer an olive branch (to anyone) — the putative promise of his campaign — he hid it behind his back.

Seventy-four days from Election Day, now Joe Biden is more of a mystery than ever.