@revelette1,
I suspect that Judging past leaders of the country by today's standards might yield a significant rewrite of our history (or that of almost any country for which this was done).
Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners. (Washington freed his slaves in his will: Jefferson did not. Jefferson also kept a slave as his mistress or concubine and she apparently bore several children by him (he is also accurately considered to have been the most liberal and libertarian of the founders (at least in terms of his expressed beliefs). Benjamin Franklin was a serial philanderer, who fathered many children with wives and others. Andrew Jackson was a vulgar, disruptive and sometimes violent figure (perhaps even more Trumpian than the current version). U.S. Grant was for a time a serious alcoholic. Woodrow Wilson was an interesting combination of a self proclaimed intellectual and a rather serious racist who exhibited far more racial intolerance than was typical of his era.
I believe the point here is that the degree of scrutiny applied to contemporary political figures far exceeds that applied in the past, and occasionally (or often depending on one's perspective) leads to, perhaps inappropriate, summary judgments about their merits as political leaders.
Life and leadership in complex organizations are complex things, and, as the history of all human organizations amply demonstrates, the qualities in a leader most needed in various situations is often significantly dependent on the situation itself and the natures of others involved. There is no single universal formula for good leadership, and the obsession with superficial virtues or, easily faked but politically correct, viewpoints that is so characteristic of the current scene will eventually be seen in history as a deviant, destructive and likely transient phenomenon ( the world has a way of imposing real challenges and threats to real organizations that require real solutions that can't be found in such a superficial environment).
As others here have noted, Biden has a long history on the political stage, and that alone makes him (or anyone else in that situation) vulnerable to the superficial changes in social mores that have occurred during that time. Judging his worth on that alone is, in my view, folly.
I will add that my impression is that Biden does indeed have a quality that I find to be usually very disabling in leaders, and that is an apparent excessive desire to be liked by others. My experience has been that those in the grip of such things can be very destructive to most organizations.
