The question is whether Democrats' best move is to run against Donald Trump a man whose presidency would require less rationalization than Trump's, but considerable rationalization, nonetheless.
And it is whether to cast their lot with a 76-year-old candidate who doesn't really much seem to want to run.
Are the Democrats headed to a post-2020 lamentation that of course Joe Biden wasn't the right nominee? After all, he never wanted to run in the first place. And he kept saying so many things that weren't so that swing voters eventually made yet another grudging late-October decision to go with Trump despite their personal disapproval of him.
You don't normally get a lot of revealing moments from serious presidential contenders. The job of a serious presidential contender is not to reveal. But a reporter the other day asked Biden why he wanted to be president and got back the kind of revelatory candor Biden is sometimes capable of--sometimes even factually.
Biden stumbled and arrived at this essence of his candidacy: "I think it's really, really, really important than Donald Trump not be re-elected."
I think that as well. So, too, do about 5.5 out of 10 of us. But that's no reason for all of us to run for president. The Democratic field is crowded enough already.
The only difference between us and Biden is that he polls far better than we would owing almost solely to his positive name identification largely because he was Barack Obama's vice president.
And that may be the only reason he's running--because somebody must beat Trump and the polls suggest he's the likeliest prospect. Gosh, he'll do it, then, but he sure does dread it.
Biden went on to say: "Could I die happily not having heard 'Hail to the Chief' play for me? Yeah, I could. That's not why I'm running."
And then, for the most remarkable comment of all, Biden was asked if he'd be running if a more conventional Republican--Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, for example--was in the White House. He answered: "I'm not sure, to be quite honest with you. I hadn't planned on running again."
He is saying the fire has gone out of his belly but he's running anyway because ... somebody has to beat Trump.
An analytical article on these comments in The New York Times on Monday advanced a reasonable case that electability becomes in Biden's case a self-fulfilling cycle. It goes like this: He leads in a poll because people think he's electable. That he leads in the poll makes more people think he's the most electable. So, he leads in the next poll, and the next, and the next.
Meantime he praises the beauty around him in Vermont while he's in New Hampshire--which could happen to anybody--and conflates misstated details of three stories about his vice presidential or senatorial honoring of a serviceman in Afghanistan. He fashions a single story that never remotely happened.
That could happen to, say, Brian Williams, who got kicked out of a network news anchor chair for it. But maybe it's more acceptable in a presidential candidate, at least if he's the one whom the polls say could best beat Trump.
Biden told the false story "on my word as a Biden" and as "God's honest truth."
They're saying it's common for our memory to play tricks on us and cause us to put unrelated events together.
The best storytellers will admit that they grant themselves license to add a little spark here and there if a story isn't soaring as they think it ought. The best storytellers never tell a story the same twice.
But the presidency is traditionally considered a job entailing less fiction than that. Or at least that was the case pre-Trump, which gets us back to where we started: Is it enough that Biden isn't as bad as Trump? Is that the prevailing standard?
There are two ways to go: Laden with a preposterous president who gaslights us daily by telling us we're not seeing what we're plainly seeing, we could turn to a Democrat who tells us things that aren't so, but less malignantly.
Or we could choose to value and insist more than ever on fact, truth and integrity.
All of this is fraught with danger for Democrats. The play-it-safe route may be their best one, since beating Trump is a greater imperative than any individual issue. But counting on Biden might not be a safe bet at all if he goes halfhearted into the general election blowing smoke.
The complexity of the question is enhanced by the fact that the Democrats don't have an obviously better alternative, meaning a candidate who clearly could hold those swing voters in late October 2020.
With his base not growing and the economy in emerging trouble, Trump's best chance still lies with the Democrats.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
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