Of this mercifully truncated presidential campaign we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?

Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.

The Democratic Party’s reckless disingenuousness regarding the president’s frailty persisted until, in 90 June minutes, the truth became public. Then, with the nimbleness of those without the ballast of seriousness about anything other than hoarding power, his party foisted on the electorate a Play-Doh candidate. Her manipulators made her malleability into her platform. Prudence is a virtue, so do not fault her handlers for mostly shielding her from public interactions more challenging than interviews with grammar school newspapers.

Her sole notable decision as a candidate has been the choice of a running mate whose self-description (“knucklehead”) is more astute than his flippancies about serious matters (the electoral college is icky, socialism is “neighborliness,” etc.) and his self-celebratory fictions about his past. Tim Walz’s achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.

Or perhaps one of the Brothers Grimm: Vance’s scary fairy tales (he calls them “stories”) about kitten-cooking Haitians, etc., are, he says, intended to be didactic. They might be if he, a bristling porcupine of certitudes, candidly demarcated his fictions from reality. The 2024 campaign has revealed the recklessness of Joe Biden’s 2020 choice of a running mate. Trump, who is 78 and who is not a martyr to the strictures of healthy living, was as reckless in choosing Vance.

Many of the nation’s 59 prior presidential elections have been choices between mediocrities, with some scoundrels thrown in (and into office). This year’s choice is, however, the worst ever.

This measured judgment is validated by pondering, one by one, previous elections. To understand how far the nation has defined mediocrity down, consider the campaign’s pitiless exposure of the candidates’ peculiar promises and reprehensible silences.

On foreign policy, Trump and Harris have different styles of being incomprehensible. He is pithy, promising to settle Russia’s war against Ukraine “in 24 hours,” details someday. She is loquacious, as when explaining the Middle East to CBS’s “60 Minutes”: “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region … We’re not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end …”

He will not say Vladimir Putin is an enemy. She will not say Israel has a right to fight as fiercely against genocidal enemies next door as the United States fought in World War II against enemies oceans away.

Trump and Harris are, however, crystal clear and completely agreed about the national debt, which increased $1.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30: They promise to do nothing about the main problem, entitlement (Social Security, Medicare) spending.

When Trump said “no tax on tips,” Harris, perhaps admiring the artful pander, said: Me, too! They also agree on repealing one of his good presidential deeds — the cap on deductions of state and local taxes from federal income tax liabilities. This would be a tax cut disproportionately for high-earners in high-tax blue states.

Trump and Harris also agree that American democracy is a papier-mâché shambles. He says elections are “rigged.” She says democracy’s protectors (the Constitution, Congress, the courts, the people) are so flimsy that only she can prevent Trump from demolishing what George Washington founded and Abraham Lincoln preserved.

Amazingly, although both candidates have constantly caused normal people to wince, neither’s voice has been the most embarrassing this year. That award goes to the Idaho Republican who, in a public forum, told a Native American to “go back where you came from.” Let’s do go back to where we come from: the nation’s founding of a limited government.

Whomever wins, both parties should be penitential about what they have put the country through. And both should begin planning 2028 nomination processes that will spare the nation a choice that will be greeted, as this year’s has been, by grimaces from sea to shining sea.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.