Mildly Infuriating

Enough to get elected.

When you strip away the identity politics, and the people that voted based on platform, he swayed people to his side.

Was/is he a Roosevelt, a Churchill, a Hitler or Stalin? No, absolutely not. But pretending that he didn't use his voice and appearance, along with calculated speech (by writers, but that's secondary) to convince people to vote for him his, well, dumb.

Pretending that every election in the era of television and even radio before it wasn't influenced by a candidate's ability to sway people into trusting them is equally dumb. There's room for argument that pre-radio, the ability of a candidate to sway votes by charisma was lower, it was still in place. It was just more labor intensive, which (imo) means that the barrier to entry for charismatics was higher. Biden wouldn't have won against someone like Jefferson, but he might have had a chance against someone like Grant.

That's what a charismatic is. They use their bodies and voices to shift thinking. If they have the backing of others in their party, it's easier because they don't have to rely only on their own skill at thinking and speaking. But go back and watch old debates. Not just Biden, all of them you can find. There's patterns of speech, gestures, and there's patterns of them across time, in every party.

Mind you, you aren't going to see every candidate because some of them aren't really allowed access to the public via the dominance of the duopoly here in the US. Even the bigger alternative parties don't get the media coverage for whatever charismatic tricks they use to reach enough people to break through identity politics.

The ones that are picked to be candidates have either swayed minds in the parties' respective power blocs, or have been chosen because they're willing to play the role for those blocs, but they aren't getting the pick if they can't at least mimic the tricks a natural charismatic uses.

Even Walter Mondale, one of the lamest candidates ever, used the same tricks. Kerry tried. Dole tried (and did well to an extent). Gore tried, and partially succeeded.

And even Mondale, who was most definitely not a natural charismatic, did okay at faking it.

Biden had the advantage of over a century of people learning how to manipulate the media, and the populace, combined with an absolute batshit opponent that made even the non-identity voters turn out.

Democrats aren't as good at rabble rousing, nor are they good at being willing to not pander to their base, so they miss opportunities.

But, yeah, Biden has charisma. He always has. It isn't Obama levels of charisma, that guy is a master of it. Obama made you believe "yes we can", even when you knew it was bullshit. He took the right messaging, the right advice and used his presence to drive it like a spike into anyone wavering at all.

Don't buy into that whole "sleepy Joe" bullshit. He got old, he dropped the ball, but he has the ability to charm the fuck out of people. He's just better at it in small groups than big ones. Little mistakes in timing that don't read well to edge cases in camera, that he can avoid when he has feedback.