Biden sleepwalks to the White House

‘You all… declare me dead. Guess what? I ain’t dead. I’m not going to die.’ That was Joe Biden back in January, speaking to the New York Times editorial board. ‘Everybody dies,’ replied a female Times board member, showing that lightness of spirit that is her newspaper’s speciality. ‘I’m not going to die politically,’ said Biden.

Well, Joe was right. He ain’t dead, politically. Assuming he doesn’t die, physically, he will on 20 January become the 46th president of the United States of America. Not bad for a 78-year old boy from Scranton, Pennsylvania with a lifelong speech impediment and a worrying tendency to forget where he is.

People said that Biden would be too old and senile to beat the political weather system that is Donald J. Trump. He has proved them wrong — just. He has been called a Democratic fossil, demented, his campaign a ‘zombie effort’. Yet it turns out, in this morbid year of disease and crisis, a zombie candidate is exactly what the majority of Americans wanted.