Which is kinda the whole point. Truly, if it was a choice between nominating the reincarnation of George Washington or the candidate most likely to defeat Donald Trump, Democrats would know which way to go.

All Sanders wants now is for Biden to adopt more of his political positions. And for the most part, the two men are on the same wavelength. It’s just that Sanders’s wavelength is more … intense. For instance, he said he’s planning to ask Biden: “Are you really going to veto a Medicare-for-all bill if it is passed in Congress?” A perfectly fair answer would be to say: “Bernie, if I win, the chances that Congress is going to send me a Medicare-for-all bill when I want something less sweeping are approximately the size of an anthill. An anthill constructed for an ant-chihuahua. Don’t be a dope.”

Forget the part about not being a dope! Exactly where we are trying not to go.

The Biden camp thinks voters have no problem with his tendency to retort creatively. (Like the time a student asked about caucuses, and he wound up calling her “a lying dog-faced pony soldier.” Which was a joke. Seriously.)

Sure, it’s unlikely that debate teams of the future are going to be studying his rhetoric. Remember the time an 83-year-old Iowan claimed Biden was “too old” to be president and Biden challenged him to a push-up competition? But we’re talking choices here. Who wouldn’t rather have a president with a habit of babbling than one who’d move into the Oval Office and start deconstructing the government’s pandemic control team?

Perhaps you remember a speech to college students Biden gave a couple of years back, in which he semi-ranted about Trump’s record on manhandling women — always a perfectly reasonable target. But he then devolved into his dream of going back to high school to “beat the hell out” of the “guy who ended up becoming our national leader.” It sorta went downhill from there, with Biden saying that his experience in locker rooms told him that a man who talked like Trump “was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”

He seemed to be getting carried away. Although of course we’ve been through a lot since then. If he was giving the speech now, Biden could say the guy in the locker room “was usually the one who’d claim he knew all about medical science because one of his relatives taught at M.I.T.”

I’m only recalling this since it gives me a chance to point out that after I wrote, rather disapprovingly, about that particular address, Biden called to thank me “for showing me what a jerk I was.”

Try to imagine Donald Trump doing something like that.

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