Given how dangerous Donald Trump truly is, how cavalier he is about torching the Constitution and tallying American casualties, it’s probably a darn good thing that he’s stone-cold stupid.

Until Joe Biden took command last night at the Democratic convention, I’d assumed that Trump’s dumbest recent act was demanding a boycott of Goodyear, an iconic Ohio employer headquartered in a crucial state that Trump can ill afford to piss off. But now that Biden has delivered his stirringly eloquent acceptance speech – a masterful mix of poetic grace and righteous anger, a veritable State of the Union address – it’s clear that Trump’s stupidest screw-up, echoed ad nauseam by his minions, was lowering the bar for Biden.

Their whole strategy (because what else can you do when you’ve helped kill 175,000 people?) has been to depict Biden as a decrepit vegetable who doesn’t know where he is or what day it is, some old fossil who drools when he tries to string together a sentence. Contrast that cartoon with the guy who capped the Democratic convention with a performance that was presidential in both style and substance.

Only Trump cultists drunk on the demagogue’s Kool-Aid could possibly conclude otherwise, but those folks aren’t reachable anyway. Last night, even some of Fox News’ commentators felt compelled to acknowledge reality; Karl Rove, the former Bush guru, said that Biden gave “a very good speech,” Brit Hume said that Biden spoke “with force and clarity,” and former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said that Biden “hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth. He had pace, rhythm, energy, emotion, and delivery.”

How so? Let us count the ways:

He prioritized country over party. Drawing a sharp contrast with Trump (one of many), he said: “While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president. I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did. That’s the job of a president – to represent all of us, not just our base or our party. This is not a partisan moment. This must be an American moment.”

He concisely defined the historic stakes in 2020: “This is a life-changing election that will determine America’s future for a very long time. Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy. They are all on the ballot. Who we are as a nation. What we stand for. And, most importantly, who we want to be.That’s all on the ballot.”

He pointedly pledged to repair our battered standing in the world, as befits a credible commander-in-chief: “I will be a president who will stand with our allies and friends. I will make it clear to our adversaries the days of cozying up to dictators are over. Under President Biden, America will not turn a blind eye to Russian bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Nor will I put up with foreign interference in our most sacred democratic exercise – voting.”

He spoke directly, and authentically, to Americans who are grieving and hurting (unlike Guess Who). Seguing seamlessly from the personal to the presidential, he said: “Let me take a moment to speak to those of you who have lost the most. I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes. But I’ve learned two things. First, your loved ones may have left this Earth but they never leave your heart. They will always be with you. And second, I found the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose. As God’s children, each of us have a purpose in our lives. And we have a great purpose as a nation: To open the doors of opportunity to all Americans. To save our democracy. To be a light to the world once again.”

He highlighted his specific plan to fight the pandemic. This virtual convention – a new concept, brilliantly invented on the fly – put heavy stress on Biden’s personal traits, most notably his empathy and talent for connecting with regular folks. (By the time it was over, I felt I was the only person in America who didn’t have his cell number.) Some critics complained of overkill and yearned for policy substance. But this election is about character and values – themes that work best on television. Anyone who wants policy can find it in abundance on Biden’s campaign website.

But Biden did talk policy, with respect to the most urgent issue of 2020: “After all this time, the president still does not have a plan (to fight the pandemic). Well, I do. If I’m president, on day one we’ll implement the national strategy I’ve been laying out since March.”

Whoa, he’s had a plan since March?! Well, guess what. It has long been posted in great detail, for anyone who has cared to pay a scintilla of attention.

He sketched it during his address: “We’ll develop and deploy rapid tests with results available immediately. We’ll make the medical supplies and protective equipment our country needs. And we’ll make them here in America. So we will never again be at the mercy of China and other foreign countries in order to protect our own people. We’ll make sure our schools have the resources they need to be open, safe, and effective. We’ll put the politics aside and take the muzzle off our experts so the public gets the information they need and deserve. The honest, unvarnished truth. They can deal with that. We’ll have a national mandate to wear a mask – not as a burden, but to protect each other. It’s a patriotic duty.

“In short, I will do what we should have done from the very beginning. Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to this nation. He failed to protect us. He failed to protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable. As president, I will make you this promise: I will protect America. I will defend us from every attack. Seen. And unseen.”

(Biden could also have pointed out that he warned of a pandemic disaster way back on Jan. 27, when nobody in America had died yet. In a USA Today guest column, he wrote: “The possibility of a pandemic is a challenge Donald Trump is unqualified to handle as president…The outbreak of a new coronavirus, which has already infected more than 2,700 people and killed over 80 in China, will get worse before it gets better. Cases have been confirmed in a dozen countries, with at least five in the United States…I am concerned that the Trump administration’s shortsighted policies have left us unprepared for a dangerous epidemic.”)

Plus, a quiet coda from an Irish poet: “Seamus Heaney once wrote, History says, Don’t hope on this side of the grave / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme. This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme…May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of the nation.”

We’ll see next week whether Trump can match Biden’s rhetorical power, compassion, and perfect pitch. (Insert your own punchline.) How foolish it was to place the bar for Biden so low that even a caterpillar could’ve vaulted it. And how fortunate we are to have a sane alternative to four more years of madness.

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Addendum:

Having heard Biden stick the landing on his biggest night, it now seems particularly foolish to assume that Biden wouldn’t have risen to the challenge. Have you ever heard the true story about Joey and the culm dump?

Richard Ben Cramer, who wrote What It Takes, the classic book about American politics, unearthed this memory of Biden’s childhood: “There was nothing he wouldn’t do. There are still guys in Scranton today who talk about the feats of Joey Biden. There was, for example, the Feat of the Culm Dump. Culm is the stuff they pile next to the mine after they’ve taken out the coal. Every mine shaft in Scranton had a mountain of culm, and in the fifties, when people weren’t so picky about the air, the stuff was always on fire. There was just enough coal carbon left in the soot to cause spontaneous combustion; pile would burn for 20, 30 years. So what you had for instance, at the Marvin Colliery, down the hill from Green Ridge, three or four blocks from Joey’s house, was a mountain on fire, lava-hot on the surface, except where it burned out underneath, and then there’d be a pocket of ash where you could fall right into the mountain, if you stepped on it…but, of course, no one was going to step on it…until Charlie Roth bet Biden five bucks that Joey couldn’t climb the culm dump.”

So he did it.

“To this day, Joe Biden has never seen the five bucks. Of course, by the time he got to the top, the five bucks wasn’t the point anymore. It was more like…immortality.”