Joe Biden joined the Democratic presidential primary race in April as the anointed frontrunner. Inevitably, as some had predicted, the more attention he received, the more his popularity tanked. Five months and countless gaffes and nonsensical ramblings later, he is barely holding on to his lead.

Biden’s steady fall in the polls is not hard to explain. His campaign excites exactly nobody. Its political lethargy was best expressed by his wife, Jill, who explained, “You may like another candidate better, but you have to look at who is going to win.” A truly stirring case for her husband.

The reason that Biden was dubbed frontrunner from the start, and the extent to which he’s tenuously clung to that position since, can be summed up with the words “Barack Obama.” Biden’s eight years as Obama’s vice president have bestowed upon him the highest name recognition among the Democratic candidates. More important, he has draped his campaign with the nostalgic blanket of the Obama years, defining himself with a term he self-servingly coined as an “Obama-Biden Democrat.” Three desperate and miserable years of Dementor-style governance in this country have created a wide, if thin, national nostalgia to tap into.