Joe Biden is running for president, and his announcement video certainly aims to soar. It's full of "bulging" veins and "fangs of racism." It features words such as "soul" and clips of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It even ends with a slow zoom on that grandfatherly face we know so well as he celebrates not America the place, but America the idea.
There’s a big way, though, in which the high-minded rhetoric falls flat. Biden isn’t only far more focused on the past than on the future — he seems to think the past was satisfactory.