Real talk: Joe Biden hasn't had too many finest hours in his 47 years plus years on the national scene. To be fair, he's had his moments – like a powerful, earthy, and impassioned 1986 speech he delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opposing the Reagan administration's apologism for the "repulsive, repugnant" Afrikaner apartheid "regime" in South Africa. Sure, he later – during the 2020 campaign – repeatedly peddled a bizarre lie that he once got arrested attempting to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. Nor does Biden sport such clean record on race relations in his own country – busing, crime bill, mass incarceration, anyone? Nevertheless, it was a damn good pitch Joe made in excoriating the (recently deceased) then Secretary of State George Schultz that July day in 1986. Moreover, within a month of that exchange Congress began debating on the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act – imposing sanctions on South Africa – which eventually passed both Houses in a rare override of Reagan's veto.

Less fanciful, but far more relevant now, was Biden's behind-the-scenes – but apparently impassioned – opposition, as vice president, to the early Obama surge in Afghanistan. In one contentious 2010 exchange with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (recorded in the latter's diary) – Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan – Biden apparently shouted: "I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women's rights! It just won't work, that's not what they're there for." In this case, at least, Biden – who'd been staggeringly wrong on Iraq – was basically right, even if his vague pragmatism strikes some as crass or callous.