Democrats don’t just need a new candidate. They need a reckoning

It was 17 years ago that Joe Biden ⁠– having just launched a second, hopeless bid for the presidency, his first having been toppled, 20 years earlier, by his habit of talking nonsense ⁠– infamously offered Barack Obama a compliment he thought magnanimous: “You got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he told the New York Observer. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” It was the political gaffe as art form ⁠– at once a casually, shockingly ugly assessment of Black leaders...