“He ran two or three times, he never got above 1%,” Donald Trump said of Joe Biden in 2019. “And then Obama came along and took him off the trash heap, and he became the vice president.” It was an amusing way to insult the former vice president at the time — perhaps less so after Biden went on to win the Democratic nomination, defeat Trump, and become president. Still, the characterization rang true insofar as Barack Obama’s choice of Biden as running mate in 2008 struck many people, justifiably, as an odd one. (Illustration by Dean MacAdam for the Washington Examiner) By then, Biden had for several decades been a loquacious self-promoter whose temper and plagiarism seemed to have blown any shot at the presidency he ever had. It was strange therefore to watch him find his way into the unexpected role of junior partner in a political relationship with a man young enough to be his son. By December 2008, Biden had accepted that Obama, after only four years in federal office, was more qualified for the presidency than he was. “We got this ticket in the right order,” he is said to have told senior adviser Ron Klain. But as Obama’s No. 2, Biden was not always a good fit. Jonathan Alter wrote in The Promise (2010) that Obama “was surprised and angry when his vice-presidential candidate seemed to say something stupid...