How Kamala Harris Can Prove She’s Not a Flip-flopping Phony

Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change (as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to aggressive policing tactics. There are two ideas about Harris this barrage is intended to reinforce: One is that she’s at heart a radical leftist, and the other is that she’s a dishonest shape-shifting politician whose word cannot be trusted.

So far, Harris is largely ignoring these attacks on her past record and her integrity, but she will eventually need to clarify her policy views, if only to buttress the impression that she indeed represents something other than Biden 2.0. And to the extent her “new way forward” contradicts or at least sounds different from her past positions, she’ll need a rationale for any “pivot to the center” that Republicans will describe as insincere or unprincipled.

In a New York Times op-ed, veteran political consultant James Carville offered an excellent formula for Harris to follow in this complicated situation:

To be the certified fresh candidate, Ms. Harris must clearly and decisively break from Mr. Biden on a set of policy priorities she believes would define her presidency …

At the same time she must break from Mr. Biden on some policy measures, she has one lingering liability she will not be able to outrun: the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, in which she and a gaggle of candidates favored more exotic positions within the Democratic Party. As last week’s CNN interview with Ms. Harris showed, this will be a consistent plotline deployed at her throughout this campaign. It’s vital that she give the same answer every time to these attacks. The retort can be simple: I learned from my time governing in the White House. These are my positions. Take it or leave it.

Harris must repeat this until the notion that she is vacillating or calculating or prevaricating dies of starvation. If she decisively lays out popular policies that distinguish her from Biden, and then sticks to her guns, her critics could soon be the ones who appear to be wandering all over creation in an effort to find some blows that land and sting. Indeed, just as Biden’s withdrawal drew attention to Trump’s age and questionable mental faculties, an opponent who “pivots to the center” and stays there could reverse the narrative and expose the former president to highly plausible charges of incessant flip-flopping and political opportunism. But there’s no time to waste for Kamala Harris to plant her flag on solid ground and then defend it. It should happen during if not before she goes head-to-head with Trump at the September 10 debate.