A chorus of voices, some of them belonging to sympathizers, has arisen to warn President Trump that the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop are a losing issue for him in the waning days of the presidential election campaign.  Instead, we hear, he should emphasize the economic promise of a second Trump term. 

Yesterday, I heard a distinctly unsympathetic commentator, Marie Harf, state that voters don't care about Hunter Biden's laptop.  She's wrong, and she knows it.  Her party's "Resistance" has persecuted President Trump for years with a series of made-up scandals — Russian collusion, Ukrainian interference, corruption, indiscretion — that are structurally almost indistinguishable from the Joe-and-Hunter scandal, except that the Biden scandal isn't made up.  Democrats did this, not because they think the public is interested in the president's phone calls or associates, but because they believe that the public is interested in his character, and they are determined to blacken it with every weapon or pseudo-weapon that falls within reach. 

The Biden campaign is of a piece with this aspect of the "Resistance."  Its main issue is simply that Donald Trump corrupts the "soul" of America and that Joe Biden is a decent guy who is equipped to repair said national "soul."  This unremitting personal attack–cum–moral posturing has virtually taken the place of any campaign on the substantive issues.  And one doesn't need to believe the polls to acknowledge that, especially for a man so cognitively challenged, Joe Biden isn't doing too badly.  Voters like to indulge in moral posturing, and Democrats have spent generations convincing them that somehow a more prosperous economy isn't really very moral.  If it didn't work, they'd never get elected.  But they do. 

Every Republican should recognize that to compete successfully against Democrats, it is necessary to oppose their claim to represent a superior morality.  This is a question not just of winning one election or another, but of breaking the spell that liberalism has cast over the minds of middle-class Americans who understandably want to be good people and live in a good country.  Since Joe Biden has erected his whole campaign on a claim to represent the "soul" of America, the single most strategic response would be to insist and demonstrate that he represents no such thing.

That is the significance of Hunter Biden's laptop.  The president should make the most of it, provided that he draws the clear conclusion that a vote for Joe Biden isn't a vote for anything normal, decent, or healing.