We will admit, right here up front, that we did not think up today's headline ourselves. It came from an extra-snarky press release from the Harris/Walz team. Following Donald Trump's bizarre appearance before the news cameras yesterday, the Harris camp put out a press release titled: "Donald Trump's Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference." The subtitle was: "Split Screen: Joy and Freedom vs. Whatever the Hell That Was."

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You may not have seen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in action yet. This is understandable, since it was only yesterday that he was named to the Democratic ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. But even if you haven't seen any clips of him yet or watched that blowout Philadelphia rally yesterday, don't worry -- you already know him.

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In a little over two weeks, the Democratic Party has gone from "Biden/Harris" to "Harris/Walz," as their ticket has now been completed with Vice President Kamala Harris's selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. But what's more astonishing than the lightning-fast schedule for all this unfolding is how utterly seamless it has all been. The party quickly unified behind Harris after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping his campaign, and from all indications today it looks like the party will further unify around the choice of Walz to round the ticket out. There are no simmering "Hillary Clinton supporters versus Bernie Bros" bad feelings tearing the party apart; instead, all the various factions seem content with the way things have worked out. That is an incredible accomplishment, for Democrats. Both progressives and centrists lined up to endorse Walz after this morning's announcement, with no hesitation.

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Last week, we wrote our third Friday Talking Points column in a row that dispensed with our usual format and was solely devoted to angst and calling on President Joe Biden to drop out of the race. This week, we are happy to say, things have changed for the better. And that's putting it mildly!

Vice President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee. Joe Biden is now officially (through his own decision) a lame duck. And Democrats by the millions have been astounded that they are now feeling genuine hope and actual enthusiasm about an election that was shaping up to be pretty grim indeed.

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What a week it has been....

Last Thursday night, America watched Donald Trump accept his party's presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention. Republicans had owned the news cycle all week long as they put on their quadrennial extravaganza, topped off with a full hour and a half of Trump rambling on about this, that, and the other. Traditionally, presidential candidates get a "convention bump" from all the free media, so perhaps Team Trump was looking forward to skating for the upcoming week, and just riding out the wave that the convention brought.

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Vice President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. She clinched this status yesterday, only a little more than 24 hours after President Joe Biden announced he would be ending his re-election bid. Convention delegates in state after state quickly met and then proudly announced they were unanimously behind Harris. This completely precluded the idea of a "mini-primary" (which many pundits had been hoping for), since no other viable Democrat even came forward to challenge Harris. So with remarkable speed, the Democratic Party has now unified behind Harris as their standard-bearer. Within the same 24-hour period, a jaw-dropping $81 million was donated to her campaign (the total is now well over $100 million). People are already volunteering to work for the campaign by the tens of thousands. Numbers aside, though, Harris has already achieved a remarkable feat -- she has excited voters.

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Back in the early 1980s (before he was in his early 80s), the punk band The Clash put out a song asking what has now become Joe Biden's new existential question:

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I cleared the decks for this column, preferring to spend today reviewing the first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle instead of writing a standard "Friday Talking Points" column. But if I had gone with my weekly format, President Joe Biden would easily have won my Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award, hands down. His debate performance last night was not just disappointing, it was downright abysmal.

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The biggest political news of the week by far was Hunter Biden being convicted in record time on all three felony gun charges lodged against him. The jury spent only about three hours before returning these verdicts, which completely undercut the narrative Donald Trump has been spouting about how the justice system is "two-tiered" -- by which he means: "weaponized against Republicans while Democrats get a free pass." Kind of hard to make that argument when the president's own son just got convicted of felonies and is facing up to ten years in prison.

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There was significant news today on reproductive rights, from two separate directions. The Supreme Court unanimously (!) overturned a case that challenged the F.D.A.'s approval of mifepristone, one of the two most commonly used abortion pills in the country. The unanimity was possible because the high court essentially punted on the legal question and instead ruled that the plaintiffs had no legal standing to bring their case. Meanwhile, in the Senate, a bill to create a federal right to in-vitro fertilization failed, mostly on party lines. Last week a bill that would have given federal protections to contraceptives also failed. Both will be used in campaign advertising by Democrats to paint Republicans as being against both contraception rights and I.V.F.

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