Talk about your shovel-ready jobs. There was ol’ Bernie Sanders, kicking off the Democratic National Convention last night, while former Ohio Congressman and Governor John Kasich, ostensibly a Republican, was racing around behind him with the rhetorical poop scoop, telling us that his new besties aren’t as radical as they claim to be.

“I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat,” said Kasich, a lobbyist and Trump hater who got his clock cleaned by him in 2016. “They fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that.”

The question, though, is whether Kasich is more believable than Joe Biden himself, who last year told us he has “the most progressive record of anybody running” and who earlier this year, having sewn up the nomination, doubled down on his boast by inviting Bernie’s socialist dream team to join his own platform task forces. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board reports, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez co-chaired the task force on climate change. Stephanie Kelton, the evangelist for Modern Monetary Theory or cost-free money printing, sat on the economy panel. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Seattle proponent of Medicare for All, co-chaired the health-care group.”

As the Journal continued, “The political cliche [sic] every four years is that party platforms don’t matter, and usually that’s true. This time is different. More than any recent nominee of either party, Mr. Biden has no clearly defined agenda of his own. Can you think of a single idea or proposal that is distinctively his? He has absorbed what his party wants, and the Biden-Sanders manifesto reflects that.”

Suffice it to say, Biden’s behavior is far more credible than are Kasich’s words. (For the record, two other RINO lobbyists — former New York Representative Susan Molinari and former New Jersey Governor and EPA head Christine Todd Whitman — also spoke last night, and neither to any avail.)

Despite Bernie’s big role last night, the evening really belonged to Michelle Obama. Last week, we talked about the former first lady’s low-grade, Trump-induced depression, and we wondered whether any flesh-and-blood human (aside from her husband) had ever gotten more universally favorable media coverage than Michelle. In any case, she was healthy enough last night to lash out at President Trump.

“Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country,” she said. “He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

Obama then made an observation about Biden that seems to have become a recurring theme of late: “I know Joe,” she said. “He is a profoundly decent man.”

Lots of folks seem to be vouching for Biden’s purported decency, but not so much his competence or his fitness for office. That should worry all of us, and it should confirm that the entire Democrat apparatus is committed to little else beyond propping him up through November 3.

For entertainment value, it’d be a bald-faced lie to say that last night’s DNC telecast merely came up a bit short — unless social media mockery is the measuring stick. “It was one of the worst things that’s ever been on television,” said one critic on the Right.

But consider the angst of lefty David Pakman: “Someone please talk me off the ledge. I want to win, and the first 22 minutes of this DNC … I’m scared. Can someone tell me how great this is or something?”

Or the insightful analysis of columnist Becket Adams: “This Democratic convention is like a more depressing version of the Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon, and that involved kids with muscular dystrophy.”

And just think: Only three more nights to go.