American radical John Reed called his exuberant account of the Russian Revolution Ten Days That Shook the World. A little more than a century later, American establishmentarian Joe Biden shook the world in a single week—from his spritely performance in the South Carolina debate to his near sweep (east of the Rockies) on Super Tuesday.

Journalists are already publishing dozens of stories chronicling the dramatic inside story of how Biden rose from the canvas to become the leading presidential contender. This predictable spate of how-it-happened reporting will undoubtedly illustrate John Kennedy’s dictum: “Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan.”

But few of these breathless accounts will convey how uninspiring Biden was as recently as last week.

On the night before the South Carolina debate, I saw Biden at a typically wan event in a gymnasium at the College of Charleston. The small and largely white crowd (never a good sign in the run-up to a Democratic primary in South Carolina) was treated to every imaginable Biden cliché in the first minute. The former vice president reeled from a “Look, folks …” to a “Here’s the deal …” like a standup comic doing a Biden imitation.

Eight days later, on Super Tuesday, the media was stunned by the extent of Biden’s surprise victory; California was the only major prize that eluded him. Its prior overconfident projections that Bernie Sanders would emerge from March 3 with an unassailable lead in the delegate count proved as accurate as every other poll-propelled prediction in this Democratic race. (In hindsight, political soothsayers would have done about as well as they did if they had consulted William Jennings Bryan through a Ouija board.)