“I’m going to give you a brief answer,” he said. “I’m going to give it to you as quick and as straight as I can.”

He then proceeded to speak . . . for 11 minutes. You can watch the video. It’s a little bit like watching Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man.” Biden walked back and forth, making little eye contact with the audience, as his thoughts poured out of his mouth. Going on. And on.

He spent decades in the Senate doing just this, which was permissible since there are no limits imposed on the amount of time a senator may speak. In her book, “The Obamas,” Jodi Kantor tells a story about Barack Obama, in the first of his three years in the Senate, listening to an endless Biden oration. The future president scribbled a note to an aide. It said: “Kill. Me. Now.”

Obama knew what Biden was. He was playing it safe with the racists by putting a reliable old white guy as his VP.