"How Joe Biden Wins It All," Frank Bruni, New York Times

How Joe Biden Wins It All

By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist

After his big victories yesterday in Michigan and several other states, Joe Biden is the emphatic favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s difficult to see how Bernie Sanders catches up. So it’s not too soon to imagine what Biden’s general-election campaign would ideally look like. It’s not too soon for advice.

What follows is hardly a comprehensive road map. It’s just a few scattered driving tips.

Biden needs to give his choice of a running mate very, very careful thought. That’s of course true for any presidential nominee, but it’s doubly true in his case, for two reasons.

First, he’s 77 now, would be 78 on the day of his inauguration and sometimes shows his wear. Many voters may care more than they typically would about the vice president being someone ready to step up and take charge if need be.

Second, Biden will be making the case that Donald Trump was an untested and thus irresponsible decision by voters, a bet that didn’t pay off, and that argument intensifies the imperative that Biden’s running mate not be someone who’s any kind of gamble. Biden’s message is competence, experience and normalcy. The Democratic vice-presidential nominee must reflect that. If that nominee is a woman, a person of color or both, all the better. That demonstrates a respect for diversity that underscores President Trump’s utter lack of it, and it could increase voter turnout in helpful ways.

Biden also needs to pace himself — and this will require delicate navigation.

While other presidential candidates have pressed themselves to tap and use every last drop of energy they possess, Biden’s store has limits: That has been evident in an unusually gentle campaign schedule during some stretches of the past year. His challenge is to make the necessary adjustments without letting that become its own dominant narrative, which means that Democrats in and around his campaign can’t be chattering on background with reporters about their concerns that if he tries to rev up, all he’ll do is sputter.

But on the flip side, he and his campaign aides can’t be so worried and self-conscious about that narrative that they defensively exhaust him. Americans aren’t looking for a superhero, and Biden’s success in the Democratic primary has shown that campaign events and retail politics aren’t the be-all and end-all. He has won in states where he barely made an effort, and that’s because his brand transcended traditional campaign mechanics.

From now until November, over and over and over, Biden needs to do what he did last night, when he delivered pitch-perfect victory remarks in Philadelphia, near his campaign headquarters. With grace and obvious earnestness, he reached out to the progressives who have supported Sanders, expressing in no uncertain terms how keenly he wants them on his team.

Even more important, he listed and modeled the precise values that are missing in Trump and that so many Americans miss in a president. And he did so with a calm and humility that repudiated Trump’s chaos and hubris. “We are a step closer to restoring decency, dignity and honor to the White House,” Biden said. “We need presidential leadership that’s honest, trusted, truthful and steady.”

“I promise you I’ll strive to give the nation that very leadership every day, every day I have a privilege to hold office,” he added.

Biden needs to be the anti-Trump without banging on too much about Trump or letting Trump dictate the terms of the conversation and tug him into the mud, where Trump is always going to be more comfortable than his rivals and where everyone is equalized because everyone is covered in muck.

Most Americans understand full well what they have in Trump, who’s beyond omnipresent — he’s ambient. Biden doesn’t need to educate them about the president’s tirades and truculence. He needs to define and personify the alternative. He needs to resist all the distractions that might pull him off that course.

A presidential campaign is above all a noise factory, with all sorts of amplified spats, exaggerated accusations, petty media fixations and silly melodramas vying to come between a candidate and what he or she knows to be right. Biden needs to stay focused on the signal, which is that he’s a release from all the ugliness and a return to stability.