When the Democrats gather at the Windy City — so named for its political palaver by an erstwhile editor of the Sun — to present their ticket to the nation, they will do so with political fortune gusting in their favor. At least if the pollsters have it right. Vice President Harris has gone from a ragged number two to a frontrunner. Governor Walz, once a coach, no doubt feels he has a lead at the fourth quarter. Yet Democrats have not always prospered at Chicago.

We were there in 1968, when leftist protesters siding against American GIs in Vietnam, precipitated a riot that shocked the nation. Backed by, in Mayor Richard Daley, a hardline, conservative mayor, Democrats handed up the last of the great party liberals, Vice President Humphrey, a supporter of the war in Vietnam. That infuriated the left wing of the party, which went into the election divided within its own ranks.

Now the situation is different, in that the party and the city have both moved far to the left of where they were in 1968 and are, at least compared to that year, relatively united around another vice president, Kamala Harris. Or at least apparently so. She did not win a single primary and so her true support within the party is unclear. She has just introduced an economic program that is so radical that the wood in the New York Post was the word “Kamunism.”

Even the Washington Post reckons that “instead of delivering a substantial plan,” Ms. Harris “squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.” It was referring to a titanic $1.7 trillion spending plan that even proposes price controls on food, a strategy guaranteed to lead to reduced production and, eventually, rising prices. The highlight of the convection will be her speech Thursday, when we’ll see whether she addresses that problem or compounds it.

Americans, after all, have little idea for what she stands. She touts her prosecutorial bona fides, but in 2020 mounted a run for presidency perfectly in sync with the anti-police zeitgeist of the time, hostile to law and order. Mr. Walz, a North Star Nero, fiddled while his city burned in 2020. Ms. Harris’s vice presidency was hardly a triumph.  No wonder Ms. Harris invokes a future “unburdened by what has been.”

A woman who knows a thing or three about speechwriting, Peggy Noonan, bluntly declares that “nobody knows how she thinks.” Yet the same cannot be said for her opponent, President Trump. Long in the spotlight, he is not a blank slate but an overpainted canvas. For all his bluster, he has a record to run on. Deregulation and lower taxes produced prosperity, jobs, and growth without inflation — with interest rates that were no doubt too low.

For all of Ms. Harris’s good press, the achievements of the administration in which she still serves are meager. Useless spending brought elevated inflation and interest rates. The Journal reckons that the Biden-Harris  “economic record has left most Americans worse off than they were four years ago.” Iran and its proxies act with impunity, likely emboldened by Washington’s relentless sniping at a Jewish state fighting a multifront war. 

In April, we asked if this convention “would be 1968 all over again.” That was due to the “Democrats’ inability to rein in their anti-Israel faction, which has repaid the administration’s capitulation to its demands with an increasing desire for confrontation.” The nominee is different from the candidate back in April, but the party is the same — from the economy to law and order to the border to America’s role in the world.

This paper holds a fondness for that sobriquet, coined by one of our editors. Saul Bellow’s Augie March is proud to be “an American, Chicago born.” The town where Michael Jordan soared and Upton Sinclair muckracked deserves better than the misgovernance and high crime of today’s Chicago. Not to mention the violence expected from the anti-Israel agitators. When Ms. Harris claims her nomination will she denounce or appease them?