Last summer I had an interesting conversation with a retired high school football coach who has launched a second career as a “quarterback whisperer.” He works with coaches at Florida’s elite football factories to identify those boys, soon to be men, who can successfully lead a team to the state championships. He told me he is close to 95% accurate identifying teens who possess “it” – “it” being a combination of the drive, skills and work ethic required to become champions. He acknowledged recognizing who has “it” gets tougher as young quarterbacks move on to college. Predicting NFL success is nearly impossible. There comes a point when mental resiliency surpasses athletic skills, which are all more or less equal.

Much the same can be said for politicians. Not many will move from local office to a state legislature and then on to statewide or Congressional positions. Wealthy men and women glance at these campaigns and assume winning should be easy. Irrespective of party, they are almost always wrong. It’s hard. Experience counts and can compensate for a lack of the interpersonal skills that project charisma. This is not meant to discount the importance of confidence and ease in conversing with strangers. Candidates need not be warm and fuzzy, although a little intrinsic empathy helps. The “it” politicians require is a perception of competence and judgment.

I frequently recall the winter afternoon in late 1966 I spent at the White House waiting on the arrival of Lyndon Johnson. As President of the student government at the College Park campus of the University of Maryland, I’d been invited to meet the president together with student leaders from the dozen colleges in the Washington area. Among the attendees from Georgetown was Bill Clinton, who told me he was planning to run for student body president in the spring. I recall he already had “it,” although I would discover several years later he had lost his election. My back was turned away from a hidden door where LBJ entered the room – yet I immediately sensed he had arrived. The purpose of the meeting was to launch a regional scholarship program for low-income families.

Not every president possesses pro-level political skills. In my lifetime, among Democrats, both Clinton and Barack Obama evidenced these, as did, among Republicans, both Ronald Reagan and, God forbid, Donald Trump. The remainder served prosaically, although both of the recent single-termers, Jimmy Carter and the elder George Bush, achieved significant policy victories before failing in their re-election campaigns against more skillful opponents. Nixon, of course, was booted to the curb by his fellow Republicans in favor of the ever-affable Gerald Ford. I must confess to a personal softness for Joe Biden, who suffers from the same appraisal Nebraska’s Republican Senator Roman Hruska passed on to Harrold Carswell’s nomination to the Supreme Court when Democrats accused Carswell of being a mediocre selection. Hruska suggested the mediocre were “…entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”

Upon returning to Maryland during the summer of 1970, Democratic Senator Joe Tydings was seeking re-election to a second term. I knew him well, as he had also been a student government officer on the College Park campus and visited us regularly. He would be the first Senate Democrat felled by a negative National Rifle Association campaign which continues to reverberate today. Relying on bumper stickers that warned, “Don’t Be A Bearer of ILL TYDINGS” did the trick. Two years later, Joe Biden attempted the leap from a local office to the Senate at the age of 29. Running against a long-serving Republican, he pulled off a seemingly impossible victory. I made several short trips that summer to help canvass voters for Biden in Delaware.

Having moved to Colorado in October, I was horrified by the auto accident that badly injured his two boys and killed his wife and daughter that December. Prepared to resign his seat, Democratic Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Minority Leader Howard Baker dissuaded him and provided a support structure that allowed him to commute from Wilmington to D.C. so he could continue to raise his sons. Biden’s 36 years in the Senate includes two failed presidential campaigns and substantial legislative ups and downs. His complicity in plagiarizing a British Labor party speech in 1988 ended that campaign’s presidential ambitions and an acknowledged mismanagement of the Anita Hill hearings also stained his record. Nonetheless, Biden carried the “Violence Against Women Act” and authored a decade-long “assault rifle” ban.

During this year’s State of the Union address he made it crystal clear he would not be bullied into adopting a “Republican-light” program during the next two years. He then cast a lure on the water regarding threats to curtail Social Security and Medicare. When House Republicans bit on it, he expertly reeled them into his net. That’s long experience married to guile. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ official response clanged every pot in the Republican culture-war armory, stepping right up to the slur used by Freedom Caucus members demanding an investigation of the Biden “crime family.”  No one believes this. Yes, Hunter Biden has been a mess, but we all have a Hunter embarrassing our families. And, out of curiosity, where are these woke mobs actually marching anyway? Show me their photos!

Joe Biden is soon likely to announce his intention to seek re-election, but he’s also smart enough to know he may not make it to the starting line. For the moment, he’s the closest thing Democrats have to a sure thing for whipping Trump again and that should carry him forward without intramural objection. Whatever karma exists in this world, it seems to have reserved Joe’s presidency for a crisis when we most needed him. For that alone, I retain my soft spot for blue-collar Joe’s unexpected presidency. Winston Churchill was elevated to Prime Minister by a Parliament that believed he wouldn’t last 90 days. Seizing the wheel and righting our ship of state was no small task. Turns out Biden has had “it” all along.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.