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He needed more makeup to look less like Emperor Palpatine, and launching by video always feels like a cop out. But Joe Biden nailed the message he needed to cement his front-runner status in the 2020 primary: This isn’t a question of politics, but the battle for America’s soul.

Biden effectively capitalized on the #Resistance’s ire while also providing an implicit but key dichotomy to those on the Right. Do you stand with a president who equivocates around the evils of white supremacy, or do you, conservative policy and all, stand with decency? He doesn’t frame the Trump administration as an inevitability, a natural endpoint for the Republican Party, but rather a mistake, “and abhorrent moment in time.” Biden came out of the gate with the distinction Hillary Clinton failed to make until it was too late: The alt-right is a cancer on, not a feature of, conservatism and the country.

Biden speaks a language nearly extinct in the Democratic Party: that America, even when we’ve failed to live up to them, is a nation of ideas. Just because the party leaders haven’t given a damn about American excellence doesn’t mean that the electorate at large will be any less receptive to it. As the New York Times studied earlier this month, the average Democrat is far more moderate or even conservative than loud people on the internet.

Hillary’s eleventh hour appeal to Republicans that they were separate from the alt-right failed on two fronts. First was the last-minute timing, and second, no one believed her. She could hardly hide her contempt for anyone who so much as considered voting for Trump, that even though her eventual plea to decency may have been true, it never rang as earnest.

Biden is believable. He’s a gaffe machine with two failed presidential bids behind him, and he’s a relic, not just in terms of his literal age — he’ll be days shy of 78 on Election Day — but also in terms of political tenor. With Democratic front-runners marching in lockstep to abolish private health insurance, nationalize one-fifth of the economy with “Medicare for all,” create a federal jobs guarantee with the Green New Deal, legalize abortion up until the point of birth, revive court packing, abandon Israel as a key ally, and ramp up wealth taxes, the Obama era looks positively moderate.

But Biden wisely framed his video around values, not policy. It remains to be seen how far left he will go, but in positioning himself as the one last Democrat who can save the country and his own party from the degradation of the Trump era, he granted himself the gravitas his polling merits. He didn’t break out his personal tragedies (including two dead children and one dead wife) or even his policy successes, such as unilaterally turning the Violence Against Women Act into law. Instead, he positioned himself as an arbiter of America, not just the Twitter Left.

He’s the front-runner, and he’s acting like it. Welcome back, Uncle Joe.