Joe Biden has been around Washington so long that he cast one of his first big votes as a U.S. senator during the Vietnam War—at a time when Bernie Sanders was a shaggy-haired radical in rural Vermont, Amy Klobuchar was in middle school, and Pete Buttigieg wasn’t even a glint in the eyes of his parents, who weren’t yet married.
As Biden frequently (and truthfully) tells voters about his vast and unmatched experience, especially in foreign policy: “I’ve dealt with every one of the major world leaders that are out there right now, and they know me. I know them.” And those same leaders, he said at another point, were phoning him and begging him to run, to save the world from an ogre of an American president, Donald Trump, and restore U.S. leadership.