PLYMOUTH NOTCH, Vt. — Two of my pundit colleagues — David Brooks of the New York Times and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal — have written about this “boring” and “inconsequential” presidential campaign.

Perhaps the reason is that we’ve heard it all before. “There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes, but that doesn’t mean old ideas that worked in the past can’t be updated and applied to our time.