Joe Biden was a United States senator for 36 years, including two years as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and vice president for eight years.
Today, the 77-year-old is the polling leader for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.
"We need a leader who can, on day one, pick up the phone to call our NATO allies and there won't be any question of whether or not the United States will meet our treaty obligations or stand up for democracy and freedom," Biden said in an October speech. "I've personally met and built relationships with almost every world leader."
However, in a National Public Radio story posted Monday, he said no one told him his son Hunter being a highly paid board member of a Ukrainian energy company when he was handling Ukrainian policy while he was vice president under President Barack Obama might be a problem.
"Nobody warned me about a potential conflict of interest," Biden said. "Nobody warned me about that. They should have told me."
In those three short sentences are all you need to know about his qualifications to be the leader of the free world.
One: Biden's 44 years of federal government experience didn't give him a clue his son being on the board of a controversial company in a corrupt country with which he personally dealt might have been shady. Two: He was willing to throw others - the infamous "they" - under the bus because the exposure of his son's position made him, a sitting vice president, look more than a little naive. And three: He couldn't own up to what he should have known about the situation in general, making him look like anything but a bucks-stops-here kind of leader.
Making the state of affairs worse is the candidate's past braggadocio about withholding $1 billion in aid to Ukraine in order to force the resignation of the country's top prosecutor. He says it was over suspicions of corruption, but others say the prosecutor was looking into the Burisma energy company on whose board his son sat for $50,000 a month.
Yet, members of Biden's political party want to impeach President Donald Trump because he suggested the new Ukrainian president might look into the whole Biden mess and because aid might have been held up in the offing. Yet, Ukraine never started any investigation, and the aid was nevertheless delivered.
If the former Delaware senator's recent words about Ukraine weren't enough, his presidency is liable to look like the eight years when Obama was president, Biden vice president, and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry secretaries of state. The Benghazi massacre, the rise and conquer of territory by the Islamic State, and the one-sided Iran nuclear agreement are a few examples of foreign policy under the tenure of those four.
But Kerry was all in last week, stumping for Biden in Iowa and New Hampshire, plumping his foreign policy bona fides as "some [of the] distinct things that make Joe Biden the person that I believe we need to have."
Yet Obama's second secretary of state on Sunday exhibited the same I-know-nothing attitude about Biden's son's involvement with the Ukraine energy company. Even though he was secretary of state at the time. And even though he was in charge of the administration's foreign policy.
He "had no knowledge" of the younger Biden's involvement, Kerry said.
However, reports have shown Christopher Heinz, Kerry's stepson, reportedly notified two Kerry aides of the younger's Biden's involvement. The two younger men had been business partners, but an email from Heinz to the aides said "there was no investment by our [joint] firm in their company." And he left the impression he didn't know why the younger Biden would become involved in the Ukraine firm.
So if the many denials are to be believed, the younger Kerry never discussed the information with his stepfather, the Kerry aides never talked with the elder Kerry, and the younger Biden never discussed his role with his father.
It sounds either like bad family dynamics or a general lack of understanding by people who should know better about the proper roles they should play. Or both.
Whatever the case, where Biden is concerned, it ought to convince potential 2020 Democratic voters he doesn't measure up as presidential material.
Add to that the former vice president's September take on the economy - "teetering on a recession" - when the November economic report showed the country added 266,000 new jobs - beating all expectations - and revised the figures for September and October higher. The unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, and wages continued to grow at a healthy pace.
So you can tack on the economy to what Robert Gates, the former Obama and George W. Bush defense secretary once said about Biden - that he's been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."
This is not a man the country needs in its driver's seat.