Seconds after Donald Trump named J.D. Vance his vice-presidential running mate, the media’s left-wing Talking Heads pronounced the 39-year-old senator from Ohio “unqualified.”

Unqualified?

Let’s compare J.D. Vance’s curriculum vitae with Barack Obama’s. Both Vance and Obama served 18 months in the Senate at the time of their nominations to a national ticket. Both went to Ivy League law schools. Both authored best-selling books about their upbringing.

Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Obama worked as a community organizer, an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School and as Illinois state senator.

Prior to Vance’s election to the U.S. Senate, he was a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq, and worked at a venture capital firm where he specialized in financing technology startups and creating jobs.

Do you get my point?

If Obama was qualified to be president, Vance is certainly qualified to be vice president and, if necessary, to assume the office of chief executive.

Nevertheless, there are significant differences between the two. Unlike Obama, Vance is a low-key, modest guy.

Vance would not make the following crass statement Obama made about people in the Rust Belt: “So it’s not surprising then that [people there] get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

No, Vance understands that the people in flyover America are good people, decent people, who may believe that the elitists in Washington and cosmopolitan America have deserted them—and they are not “deplorables.”

Nor would Vance articulate a view of himself as Obama did when he became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008: “This is the moment the world has been waiting for…. This is the moment when the rise of the ocean began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

And if elected, I do not expect Vance to say anything close to what Obama said after his 2008 election: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about politics on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Unlike Obama, Vance is not a super egoist. He lifted himself by his bootstraps and worked hard to achieve the American dream.

As for the Republican convention—it was well choreographed.

The words spoken by family members who lost their loved ones in Afghanistan were moving. The words spoken by the victims of New York’s defund the police policies and lax bail laws sent a strong law and order message.

To hear Sean O’Brien, the head of the 1.3 million Teamsters Union, castigating “big business” at a GOP convention, was extraordinary. “Massive companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and Walmart,” he bellowed, “take zero responsibility for the workers they employ. These companies offer no real health insurance, no retirement benefits, no paid leave, relying on undefined public assistance. And who foots the bill?  The individual taxpayer.”

O’Brien’s pro-union speech could have been delivered at the 1948 Democratic convention that nominated Harry Truman or at JFK’s 1960 convention.

As for Donald Trump: dodging an assassin’s bullet by a quarter of an inch was remarkable.

Trump’s brush with death was his “come to Jesus” moment. One can only hope that there is a “New” Trump who campaigns as a unifier and who appeals to the better nature of all Americans.

Trump began his acceptance speech at the convention by taking the high road describing the assassination attempt, and paying tribute to the retired fireman who died and to those who were seriously injured.

But later in his 90-minute speech, when he was ad-libbing, he lapsed into the same old accusations and name-calling. That was unfortunate.

At this point in time, the November election is Donald Trump’s to lose. If he forgets the grudges, describes his governing vision for America and curbs his outlandish comments about the heir apparent, Kamala Harris, he may well be the first ex-president since Grover Cleveland in 1893 to regain the office of chief executive.