Maybe it is because his 79 years have traversed so much US history, but few sitting presidents have been compared with so many of their predecessors as Joe Biden. In keeping with the journalistic tradition of assigning each new occupant of the White House a presidential soulmate from the past, commentators initially likened him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat he so desperately yearns to emulate. Like FDR, Biden took his oath of office at a moment of national peril, and proposed an ambitious legislative program to alleviate the crisis – in Roosevelt’s case poverty, in Biden’s the pandemic.

This historical honeymoon phase, however, did not last long. By the end of his first summer in the White House, much of his legislative program was stalled in Congress, while the botched withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan accentuated the sense of America’s 21st-century decline. As his approval ratings plummeted, and inflation started to soar, the 46th president was paired with the 39th, the one-term Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Since then, Biden has been likened to Gerald Ford, another president who tried to repair American democracy after it had been attacked by a flagrantly criminal predecessor, Richard Nixon. Most recently, after a string of successes in Congress, he has been cast as the new LBJ. Not since Lyndon Johnson, the argument plausibly goes, has a president amassed such a record of legislative accomplishment: a $1.9 trillion stimulus package (the American Rescue Plan), the Inflation Reduction Act (which will shore up Obamacare and curb greenhouse emissions), an infrastructure act, a much-needed boost for the US semiconductor industry, and the most significant gun control legislation in nearly thirty years. Compiling his own list of presidential antecedents, the White House chief of staff Ron Klain recently boasted that Biden had passed the biggest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower, confirmed the most judges since Kennedy and delivered the second-biggest healthcare bill since Johnson.

For all these historical parlour games, however, we are ultimately left with the reality of the here and now: Joe Biden is Joe Biden, a president who will almost be 82 at the time of the next election; an ageing incumbent who, despite recent successes, many in his party think should not seek a second term.

When first I saw Biden on the campaign trail in 2020, at a small-town hall event before the Iowa caucus, I was shocked by how shambling he had become. His stump speech that day became a word salad. At times he spoke almost in a whisper. Frequently he lost his train of thought, especially when he spotted familiar faces in the audience which prompted him to share obscure personal reminiscences that served no political purpose.

This campaign event came to enjoy a long afterlife on social media because of his response to my request for an interview with the BBC, which was then my journalistic home. “The BBC?” he deadpanned, “I’m Irish” – a throwaway comment, delivered with his trademark grin, that caused conniptions in Whitehall and brought on a cascade of columns about the death of the trans-Atlantic “special relationship”. What stayed with me, however, was two seemingly divergent thoughts: Joe Biden was a terrible candidate, but he nonetheless remained the best-placed Democrat to win back the trifecta of Rust-Belt states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, needed to defeat Donald Trump.

Two-and-a-half years on, I find myself in the same place. For all his flaws, for all his brain fades, for all the awkward moments when he has looked like a world-weary president at the end of his second term rather than midway through his first, he remains the Democrats’ most viable candidate.

Vice-President Kamala Harris, his most obvious replacement at the top of the ticket, would be hit by misogyny and racism – misogynoir is the term that describes the double-edged discrimination against Black women. The current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who tried in 2020 to become America’s first openly gay president, would face a barrage of homophobia, much of it cloaked in the guise of anti-wokeness. Gavin Newsom, the telegenic Governor of California, would be painted as a San Francisco ultra-liberal. Some of the other up-and-coming Democratic governors, such as the billionaire J.B. Pritzker in Illinois, are little known outside their states. Stacey Abrams, who is campaigning in Georgia to become America’s first Black female governor, is a force to be reckoned with, but she would doubtless run up against the same wall of prejudice as Vice-President Harris. Besides, which one of them could repeat Biden’s Rust Belt success?