Joe Biden seemed ‘normal’ in 2020, but then came his nothing-normal presidency

Joe Biden won the normality test in 2020. 

There wasn’t anything remarkable about him.

He just seemed like a steady hand who had been around for a while, who didn’t look or sound like a radical and who knew how Washington worked. 

He wasn’t the leader of a movement, wasn’t charismatic and wasn’t particularly witty or well-spoken.

He was, in fact, completely uninteresting and utterly conventional. He was just the most normal guy in the room. 

He benefited from a favorable contrast with the magnetic, endlessly interesting, constantly outrageous, norm-busting President Donald Trump, whose theatrical and chaotic governance made him vulnerable to a basement campaign run by a candidate happy, in ice-cream terms, to be vanilla to Trump’s rocky road.