The vice presidential debate last week between Senator Vance and Governor Walz may have been the most important debate in many years, apart from the one that led to the withdrawal of President Biden. Mr. Vance completely debunked the theory that he was “weird,” harsh, an extremist, or anything but an intelligent, accomplished, courteous, and thoughtful person.

It is only fair also to put in a good word for his opponent. Instead of the extreme leftist installing tampon dispensers in male washrooms in Minnesota’s high schools or dismissing advocates of completing the southern border wall with nonsense about its vulnerability to “30-foot ladders,” he seemed a decent person doing his best with the impossible task of trying to move away from the record of the outgoing administration without obviously rebuking the incumbent vice president who recruited him as her running mate.

It was endearing when his principal explanation for having claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the repression in Tiananmen Square in 1989 was that “Sometimes I’m a knucklehead.” This is a profoundly refreshing admission of frailty, in stark contrast to Secretary Clinton when she said she’d been subject to sniper fire at Sarajevo’s airport, when news film disclosed a military band and honor guard out to greet her along with little girls presenting flowers; or when she told an audience in New Zealand that her parents named her after Edmund Hillary because of his conquest of Mount Everest. (That event occurred six years after she was born.) 

Mrs. Clinton claimed to have misremembered Sarajevo because of jetlag and was slightly confused about the history of mountain climbing. Even more annoying have been Mr. Biden’s many years of chronic fabrications: his academic career, his attempt to visit Nelson Mandela, cribbing lines about his impoverished ancestry from the unsuccessful British Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, his uncle eaten by cannibals, the son who died in combat — it has been a never-ending sequence of unconscionable falsehoods with no attempt ever to explain them or apologize for them. Perhaps Mr. Walz announces the triumph of nostalgia within the Democratic Party for the admirable candor of Harry Truman, Al Smith, and other distinguished past Democratic leaders.    

It has become a truism in the days following the debate to say that Mr. Vance gives a better explanation of the Trump program than President Trump himself does. This is partly true, but it is more accurate to say that Trump made a brilliant choice of vice presidential candidate in Mr. Vance, not only because of the senator’s qualities, but to deal with the tactical problem of maintaining the vast Trump base of scores of millions of MAGA followers with the effort simultaneously to recruit enough independents to ensure a clear victory insusceptible to the Democratic skullduggery with unverifiable harvested votes which so tarnished the 2020 election.

President Trump can keep his base torqued up with his vintage rallies such as his address on Saturday at Butler, Pennsylvania, site of the first assassination attempt against him, where 100,000 people attended and his opening words were “As I was saying.” Senator Vance is proving an expert fisherman among the relatively narrow band of independent and undecided voters and wavering Democrats.                                                         

There are a few outstanding whoppers still bandied about by the Democrats as if they were lapidary canons of recent American history that need to be summarily contradicted. The argument that the proposed border compromise plan was any kind of a solution is a monstrous falsehood.

If adopted, 1.85 million illegal migrants would be accepted, plus various other forms of permitted illegal entry, and the authorities would be relied upon to have a precise enough grasp of the number of illegals entering the country to enable them to shut the border when the total exceeded the rate of 1.85 million annually. 

If they can shut the border at that point, why not shut it preveniently and admit legally all those whom it is desirable to admit? Another industrial-scale canard is the fraud that Trump disastrously mishandled Covid. He was accused of being a racist when he shut down direct air flights from China and the Democrats give him no credit whatever for sponsoring the development of a vaccine three years ahead of what Dr. Anthony Fauci said was possible, saving millions of lives in America and around the world. 

To cite just one more of these, it is unutterably tiresome to hear the completely dishonest assertion the Trump’s tax cuts were exclusively for the benefit of the rich; 83 percent of American taxpayers had their taxes reduced and the percentage of the reduction steadily increased from the higher down through the lowest tax brackets. By far the greatest tax cuts in percentage terms were achieved by lower income individuals and families. There are many other such liberties with the facts that the Democrats have been accustomed to taking but these three in particular are sitting ducks of mendacity that should be dispatched.

It is still the conventional wisdom that this is a close election, but I do not think so. The only polls that have any record of reliability are those unassociated with the left-wing press  and universities and in particular Rasmussen’s and Trafalgar. They both show Trump leading the national popular vote by between 1 percent and 2 percent.

As I have mentioned here before, this means that if allowance is made for the fact that the Democrats carry California and New York (82 electoral votes) by almost 5 million more votes than the Republicans comfortably carry Texas, Florida, and Tennessee (81 electoral votes), Trump is leading by about 8 million votes in the other 45 states. 

Most of the swing states are close but Trump is almost always underestimated, and he does have the momentum. An increasing number of commentators, most recently Megyn Kelly, have pulled the curtain back and flatly stated the obvious that the Democratic presidential candidate is someone about whom two-thirds of Americans were embarrassed as vice president two months ago. And she is just as hapless as her outgoing president without a teleprompter and without the excuse of age that should be accorded to Mr. Biden. This should not be a close election and only the Democratic stranglehold on the morally bankrupt majority of the national political press make it seem close.