HUGO GURDON: Biden atop the greasy pole.

Lord Randolph Churchill might therefore have summed up Biden’s career as “failure, failure, partial success, incipient failure, ultimate victory.”

There, however, the parallel with Disraeli ends. The British statesman was a leader who made things happen and shaped politics. They didn’t just take place while he happened to be there, more or less coincidentally, at the top of what he referred to as the “greasy pole.” Disraeli overhauled his party and created modern conservatism. He was a populist who built a middle-class movement, patriotic sometimes jingoistic in character, that had little in common with the landed-gentry Tory party from which it grew.

Biden, by contrast, is neither leading nor reshaping his party. It is changing, for sure, but is doing so not because he is directing it but because he has little influence over what is happening to it. He is prepared to let others decide where it goes, as long as he is allowed to stay at the top of the greasy pole.

During his presidency, the Democratic Left has become a radical battering ram smashing down successive sets of protective doors behind which the norms, traditions, and decencies of our rule-of-law, liberal democratic culture lie vulnerable.

Biden isn’t going anywhere and none of the damage matters, not even his increasing senescence, so long as the Big Guy gets his 10%.