The End of Character Politics

Did Joe Biden overcome the reasons America rejected him as president before, or just outlast them?

One of Watergate’s less obvious but lasting effects was that a politician’s “character”—a capacious term that would eventually encompass all kinds of supposed virtues and flaws—became an object of increasingly obsessive scrutiny for the press and the public. This was a noticeable shift. John F. Kennedy, for instance, was famously unfaithful to his wife, and yet, as Lesley Stahl told Radiolab in 2016, “we wouldn’t have dreamed of printing that even if the whispers...