Democrats want Biden to do the decent thing and stand down.

But Biden is not a decent man.

For three-and-a-half years, the Democrats lied about Joe Biden. They’re still lying about him, but for a different purpose.

Their original purpose was to convince Americans that Joe Biden was fit for the office of president. Towards that end, they and their media allies kept vouching for Biden’s acuity. This or that Democratic bigwig would rave about his ability to understand complicated policy issues and ask probing questions.

Now, after this view of Biden was exposed as false in less than 15 minutes of debate, the Democrats are lying for a different purpose. Hoping to persuade Biden to step aside, they are flattering him by raving about his first term and his personal decency. The idea is to convince Biden that his wonderful legacy and reputation would be undermined by remaining in the race and losing to Donald Trump.

As an example of the first bit of flattery, consider Karen Tumulty’s claim that Biden could go down as “the most successful one-term president in modern history, maybe ever.” Does she really believe this?

What about James Polk, “the president who did it all in one term”? Shortly after taking office, Polk listed his four priorities to historian George Bancroft. They were:

• The settlement of the Oregon Question with Great Britain.

• The acquisition of California and a large district on the coast.

• The reduction of the Tariff to a revenue basis.

• The complete and permanent establishment of the Constitutional Treasury, as he loved to call it, but as others had called it, “Independent Treasury.”

Polk accomplished all of this and added a huge expanse of territory in the southwest, including Texas, to the U.S.

Turning to “modern history,” consider George H.W. Bush. Under his leadership, the U.S. defeated Iraq and liberated Kuwait. In addition, Bush helped enact two major pieces of legislation — amendments to the Clean Air Act and to the Civil Rights Act. Whatever one’s view on the merits of these laws (liberals like them, conservatives not so much), they are more consequential than anything Joe Biden helped enact.

Biden doesn’t even have a strong claim to being the most successful one-term president of this century. Most Americans believe, as I do, that Donald Trump, not Biden, holds this distinction. That’s why Trump, despite his considerable personal shortcomings, was leading Biden in the polls even before the current president’s disastrous debate performance.

As for the claim that Biden is a decent man. Jonathan Tobin demolishes it. He shows that “the refrain that Biden is a ‘good’ or ‘decent’ man falls flat when you consider the president’s decades of recorded lies and slander.”

Tobin cites Biden’s lie about the traffic accident that killed his wife and young daughter:

For many years, he claimed that the accident was caused by a drunk driver. But the truth was that those familiar with what happened say Neila Biden was at fault and drove into the path of the tractor/trailer driven by Curtis Dunn, causing the collision.

Biden’s grief at this horrible incident is to be pitied. But that he, a public figure, repeatedly spoke of an innocent private citizen as essentially having murdered two people is despicable. . . .

Much as we should all sympathize with the trauma he went through, forcing Dunn to live with the opprobrium brought down upon him by a senator was deeply wrong. In 2008, Dunn’s daughter called on Biden to apologize and said he called to do so. But he never cleared the record on this smear in public.

Tobin points to the same lack of common decency Biden manifested after a fatal accident caused by his brother Frank. There’s also Biden’s plagiarism; his smearing of Robert Bork (after having said he would support Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court); his smearing of Clarence Thomas; and his insistence, even after the charge had been thoroughly debunked, that Trump claimed the neo-Nazis at the 2017 Charlottesville rally were “very fine people.”

We also know that Biden regularly yells and curses at staff members, a practice that dates back to his time as a Senator.

I provided an insiders glimpse of Biden in action when I posted an article by my friend Steve Silbiger about his interaction with Biden as a lobbyist for a left-liberal union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

The article was about Steve’s efforts in 1982 to persuade Biden to oppose the Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment. During their meeting, Biden was unmoved and seemed not to understand the issue. (In retrospect, Steve is unsure whether Biden feigned his lack of comprehension or simply wasn’t smart enough to grasp the issue.)

Several weeks later, Biden met in Delaware with state leaders of the AFL-CIO. Afterwards, under pressure, Biden dropped his support for the Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment.

That should have been the end of the matter, but it was not:

I soon received a phone call that the Senator wanted to see me. I went to his office and witnessed something I had not seen in my nearly two decades on Capitol Hill.

Once I sat down, Biden got up and started to yell at me. He bellowed “you are going to lose this issue. You are going to lose this issue because the Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment sounds good and the American people are stupid and will support anything that sounds good.”

I remember sitting there in partial amusement. For close to two years I worked for Jerry Wurf, the then recently deceased President of AFSCME who built a million member union. While Wurf was brilliant, tenacious, and shrewd, he also had a volcanic temper and would yell so loudly that you could almost feel the walls shake. As I sat through Biden’s tirade, I kept thinking that Joe Biden was no Jerry Wurf in any way.

When I walked out I remember thinking what an arrogant buffoon he must be for supposing that by bellowing at me could bully someone who was born in a refugee camp, and whose parents were Holocaust survivors.

This is not the behavior of a decent man. It’s the behavior of a man with a deep sense of entitlement and more than a little contempt for the American people.

These same traits are now on display — to the chagrin of Democrats who, understanding that he’s unlikely to win the election and, if elected, would be unable to serve capably, are urging him to do the decent thing and stand down.

I don’t know whether Biden will continue to resist their calls, but if he does, the Dems will be getting what they deserve for elevating Biden to the presidency and then lying to protect him.