When did politics become such fun? While Democrats will roll up our sleeves to win the November election, in the meantime one of our candidates is clearly having a good time with the process. Every time she strides across a stage, she beams. Her smile is an incandescence. Her wave joyful.

And as we get to know him, her avuncular running mate, projects joy and confidence. The chemistry between Vice President Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is visible and bodes well for this campaign.

The best thing about VP Harris and her 3-week-old campaign is that she has not stooped to the bizarrely weird level of her opponent. Whether he is attacking her race, minimizing the size of her crowds or being ignorant and insulting (“low IQ individual”), she allows her surrogates to respond to his idiocy and floats above the nonsense.

And while the former president delivers rambling and incoherent attacks, his running mate Sen. JD Vance is slightly more coherent, but equally ignorant.

He and his wife have dialed back on his bizarre comments about “childless cat ladies,” but even their dial back raises questions.

For example, Vance, who did not support the child tax credit in the Senate, now describes Democrats as “anti-family.” His wife, Usha, who is reportedly a brilliant Yale-educated lawyer, attempted to defend the crass remarks by saying they were just a “quip” and that he would never insult people who are “trying to have children.”

In other words, I suppose, those who choose not to have children are the ones he has contempt for. One in six adults have no biological children for any number of reasons. Vance apparently does not mind alienating such a significant portion of the population.

Watching the Republicans unravel is amusing. The latest baseless Trump claim is that the rousing crowd (estimated at 15,000) that turned out for VP Harris’ Detroit landing on Aug. 7, was AI-generated. Several news organizations attended the rally and have live footage of it, but the former president, in his dotage, claims that Harris somehow “manipulated” the photographs that were featured on the front pages of many newspapers. Even more bizarrely, the former President, obsessed with crowd size, has claimed that he has drawn larger crowds than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Is this the person we want to have the nuclear codes?

Even Trump’s former close allies, like U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and House Speaker Mike Johnson have urged the former president to stop the personal attacks and stick to the issues. He would have to remember the issues to stick to them!

Instead, Trump has spawned a new industry – fact checking! National Public Radio found that his hour-long press conference on Aug. 8 asserted “at least” 162 “misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies.” That’s more than two lies a minute.

Beyond the lies and misstatements, there is the toxic energy that Trump exudes. He is in constant attack mode and he has a dystopian vision of our country. It appears he wants to frighten people into thinking that Democrats will “ruin” the country and, especially, the economy.

While economic fluctuations and inflation have been troubling for some, President Biden has improved the economy from the time that he became president.

Indeed, his challenge has been to clean up the mess that the 45th president left.

Meanwhile, VP Harris continues to comport herself with grace and joy. There is a refreshing contrast between the dour scowling incoherent elderly man, and the vital, joyful vice president.

Our nation does face some of the challenges that could wipe the smile off anyone’s face, and we certainly don’t expect her to smile her way to the Sept. 10 debate (if Trump manages to show up), but her effect of joy, even among the challenges is a much-needed change of focus for our nation. It explains, perhaps, why Harris attracts the large crowds that seem to unsettle the former president.

Grace, joy, determination, firmness, amiability and cordiality are words that describe VP Harris’ campaign. And millions of Americans appreciate it. It fuels the momentum that Republicans like to dismissively call a “sugar high.” Democrats are high but not on sugar We are high on joy and possibility.

The writer is a Washington-based economist and author.