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Sounds canned?

2. In 1994, Jeff Connaughton, an Alabamian who had moved to Washington in the hope of dedicating his life to public service, attended a fund-raiser for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy family manor in McLean, Virginia. During the party, Connaughton slipped into the study, where he discovered a bound volume of Robert F. Kennedy’s notes, including handwritten drafts of speeches. Connaughton’s eyes fell on a sentence that read “We should do better.” Kennedy had crossed out “should” and replaced it with “must.” Connaughton, a conservative Democrat, was moved. This was his core idea of politics: great speeches, historic figures, a common purpose. In the annals of Washington, Connaughton was that overlooked yet necessary thing—not a leader but a follower. He later said of himself, “I am the perfect No. 2 guy.”

For years, the man whose No. 2 he wanted to be was Joe Biden. In 1979, Connaughton was a business major at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, and the head of a nonpartisan student group that invited Biden—then a thirty-six-year-old senator from Delaware, in his second term—to give a speech on campus. Connaughton was short, smart, and sandy-haired, with the inferiority complex that’s bred into boys from Alabama. Biden arrived looking trim and confident in his tailored suit and expensive tie.

As Connaughton later wrote, two hundred people assembled in a lecture hall to hear the speech. “I know you’re all here tonight because you’ve heard what a great man I am,” Biden began. “Yep, I’m widely known as what they call ‘Presidential timber.’ “The crowd laughed nervously, thrown by his sense of humor. “Why, just earlier tonight, I spoke to a group of students who had put up a great big sign, ‘Welcome Senator Biden.’ And then when I walked under the sign I heard someone say, ‘That must be Senator Bidden.’ “The laughter rose.