To nobody’s surprise, former President Barack Obama has endorsed his old running mate, Joe Biden, putting an end to silly speculation that there may have been some falling-out in our politics’ most notable bromance.

The simple explanation for the delay was Obama’s somewhat stiff-necked decision that a former president ought stay out of internal party competitions to succeed him.

Now that the non-mystery has been resolved, the gate is wide open for other leading Democrats and former rivals to follow Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to climb aboard the Biden bandwagon, which has been unfortunately stalled by the coronavirus crisis and its imposition of social distancing.

The very nature of Biden’s major appeal to the electorate — that he offers a safe and sane return to normalcy in the country after more than three years of Donald Trump’s incompetence and insanity — should be more than enough to deliver his election in November. But as the 2016 election demonstrated, a sizable part of the electorate avidly believes the lies of a political shill and faker. So Biden is obliged to offer more than a Willy Loman smile and shoeshine.

This he has done over 36 years as a U.S. senator from Delaware and eight years as vice president, most notably as Obama’s wingman in directing the 2009 economic recovery from the Great Recession at home and restoring American global leadership abroad.

Biden did so while bearing a major political scar from his 2003 vote in favor of George W. Bush’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq, based on the false contention that it had weapons of mass destruction poised to attack the West. Biden rationalized that vote on the grounds Bush had assured him he didn’t intend to invade but rather needed his vote to achieve United Nations backing. Ever since, Biden has paid a political price while regretting that vote.

To this day, the prospective Democratic presidential nominee has been taunted by Republicans and other critics, especially in the news media, for a series of essentially minor personal misstatements that have caused him to be labeled “a gaffe machine.” Coupled with increasingly recurring questions about his advanced age — he will be 78 in December — his ability to serve as president has been raised, even though he is a year younger than Sanders and only four years older than Trump. But his doctor vows that Biden’s age imposes no limit on his ability to lead the country. At an Iowa campaign event last fall, he challenged a heckler to a pushup match or a footrace to prove the point.

But the current hiatus that has kept Biden off the campaign circuit has been an obvious impediment to a seasoned political campaigner who has always relied on his personal persuasive skills and empathetic manner. Currently he has been limited to courting voters via a makeshift studio in the basement of his Wilmington, Del., home, from which he offers televised remarks on how as president he would deal with the coronavirus crisis and other pressing political issues of governance.

Still to be determined is if public health considerations will permit the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee — now rescheduled for mid-August — to occur, and under what conditions.

Meanwhile, President Trump continues his verbal assaults on “Sleepy Joe” Biden, whom he has openly identified as his likely election foe, and on whom he infamously sought political dirt from the president of Ukraine, using Biden’s son Hunter, formerly on the board of a giant energy firm there, as a foil.

At any rate, the former vice president appears to have made considerable progress already toward unifying the moderate and progressive elements of his party behind him, including young Sanders voters, and has more time to do so in this unpredictably stalled presidential campaign.

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Jules Witcover’s latest book is

“The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books.