The Harris-Walz campaign proved two important things last week. First, it proved that sometimes all you really have to do is answer attacks—the mere fact of answering them deflates their momentum. Second, it proved that Democrats have finally learned something from brazen Republican presidential campaigns over the years: Convert your perceived weakness into strength and their perceived strength into weakness.

The campaign did both of these things effectively last week. And it drove Donald Trump, and Republicans generally, nuts. Democrats aren’t supposed to do that! It’s like Cinderella saying she’s not doing the dishes. But Democrats are saying it, and it’s effing awesome.

The answered attacks concerned the swift-boating of Tim Walz’s National Guard service. The day Kamala Harris named Walz as her running mate, I, like the rest of you, saw the four or five main lines of attack they were going to trot out against Walz. Too left-wing, too old; choosing him over Josh Shapiro proved that Harris was captive of the hard left; one or two others.

I thought they were all preposterous and wouldn’t go anywhere—with the possible exception of the National Guard thing. The fact that Walz retired from his unit two months before it shipped out to Iraq seemed like something that (a) probably had a plausible explanation but (b) could nevertheless be made to stick. And for the first 24 hours, the Harris-Walz campaign didn’t have a good answer.

But over the course of the week, the campaign completely neutralized the attack. It turned out that there was indeed a plausible explanation—that, while his unit maybe did hear talk that it would be deployed,........

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