After the first Trump assassination attempt, the country was probably ready to give the former president a decisive lead: all he had to do was give a calming, unifying, somewhat humble convention speech, perhaps find some providential meaning in his miraculous turn of the head the moment before the shots were fired, and wrap it up in 35 minutes of so.
Then came the remarkable inner party coup against Joe Biden, which was, qua political maneuver, as deft as anyone my age had ever seen in American politics. Kamala Harris was suddenly the Democratic nominee, and for a sustained month of unimaginably fawning media coverage, no one could quite remember why it was that Democratic politicians and fundraisers had for years been shaking their heads about the vice president.
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