Senator Vance and Governor Walz are bringing optimism to the campaign trail after their vice-presidential debate. They carry with them the hopes of Americans seeking a tonic for the election’s angry politics, where President Trump and Vice President Harris focus so much on personality that policy often seems an afterthought.

“A lot of Americans don’t know who either one of us are,” Mr. Vance said at the start. According to FiveThirtyEight, about 20 percent had no opinion of the senator and one-in-four none of Mr. Walz. After last night, Americans know both men better, and were given every reason to like what they saw.

The debate was held at the CBS studios at Manhattan where the beloved TV personality, Bob Keenan, entertained children for 30 years as “Captain Kangaroo.” It was as if the amiable Keenan had coached both candidates. Insults were absent, with Mr. Walz not once referring to President Trump as “a convicted felon,” the standard barb from Democrats.

Neither candidate fulfilled a vice president’s traditional attack-dog role, and it may have been just as well to try and persuade rather than snarl. According to FiveThirtyEight, only one vice-presidential debate in the last six cycles has moved the national polls — and even that was a mere 1.2 percent bump for President George W. Bush in 2000. 

Appropriate for Keenan’s old stage, the debate reminded me of 1920’s “Kangaroo Election.” Historians call it that because the tops of the tickets — President Harding for the Republicans and Governor James M. Cox of Ohio for the Democrats — proved far weaker than the bottoms, Presidents Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Coolidge allegory might fit for Mr. Vance, who was smooth on articles of conservative doctrine and displayed a command of the facts. “This election is about the future,” he said when asked about January 6, pivoting to saying that Democrats favor “government censorship” which “is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment.”

Mr. Vance kept his focus on Ms. Harris in a way that Republicans often lament Trump does not. He mentioned President Biden only to say that he agreed with him keeping Trump’s tariffs on Communist China. Otherwise, he referred to “the Harris Administration.”

Mr. Walz displayed earnestness, and an understanding of the give-and-take required to govern that stands in contrast to Ms. Harris. But there was little sign that he has FDR’s potential. He sputtered out of the gate before regaining his footing, but often reverted to looking nervous and wide-eyed.

Mr. Walz owned up to his limitations head-on, which may help voters forgive. “I misspoke,” he replied when asked why he’d said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre when he was not. “I misspeak all the time,” he said. As if to prove it, he later remarked, “I’ve become friends with school shooters.”

The meme makers are feasting on that blunder. “Vance is a skilled, talented debater,” the syndicated Premiere Networks host, Michael Berry, told me via email. “He structures his arguments, making them both probative and persuasive. He’s confident, capable, and charismatic. He’s substance and style” while Mr. Walz “is neither.”

Mr. Vance, twenty years Mr. Walz’s junior, looked at ease and on message in ways his opponent on stage and Trump are not. He mentioned his “three beautiful little kids” three times and paused to comfort the governor after he said his son had been at a community center shooting.

In a veteran TV move, Mr. Vance broke the fourth wall with impish glances at the camera while Mr. Walz was speaking. By bringing up his family’s experience suffering from drug addiction in Appalachia and connecting it to smuggling at the southern border, he did his best to connect with the audience at home.

Asked about saying he thought Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” Mr. Vance smiled. “I believed,” he said, “some of the media stories.” On abortion, he laid the GOP’s weaknesses bare as Mr. Walz had done about misstating facts of his life. “We’ve got to do a better job,” the senator said twice, “at winning back people’s trust” on abortion.

All those little moments added up for Mr. Vance. It will be up to voters to decide if he seemed genuine or slick. He was hit for side-stepping questions about whether Trump had lost the 2020 election or would support a federal abortion ban — which the former president posted on Truth during the debate that he would not.

“There’s a continuation of these guys to try and tell women or to get involved” in abortion, Mr. Walz said, stating that his “line” is “just mind your own business on this.” It was as close as the debate came to confrontation. Those who tuned in for red meat went home hungry.

On Israel, Iran, immigration, abortion, housing, and manufacturing, the candidates ended on hopeful notes, pledging to work in the bipartisan fashion our republic requires to improve the status quo. That status quo being synonymous with the incumbent, Mr. Vance offered Mr. Walz sympathy.

“He has a tough job,” Mr. Vance said of Mr. Walz, because he “has to pretend” that Trump didn’t deliver “rising take home pay” and “lower inflation” while defending “Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record, which has made gas, groceries, and housing unaffordable for American citizens.”

In the 90-minute debate, the candidates said a version of “We agree” thirty times. “I think there was a lot of commonality here,” Mr. Walz said at the close. “Me too, man,” Mr. Vance responded. The candidates wrapped by thanking each other and lingered afterwards with their spouses for more smiles.

Last night’s faceoff may not provide a bounce for either ticket. But if the performances by Mr. Vance and Mr. Walz influence their running mates to talk more vision than vitriol in the closing month of the campaign, they’ll have done the nation a great service — and make Captain Kangaroo proud.