Kamala Harris, the shiny new object in a race that has captivated the nation for all the wrong reasons, is basking in her mini honeymoon. She is being celebrated as younger, hipper, and sharper than the man she replaced on the ballot. As a woman of color, she has predictably been greeted with great fanfare in big media. She wrapped up the necessary delegates and raised $100 million on her first day atop the ticket. She will soon name a vice-presidential nominee, which is sure to produce more attention and adulation. And she will be handed her party’s presidential nomination on a video call without ever securing a single primary vote – nice work if you can get it. Finally, she will take center stage at the Democratic National Convention, confident in the certainty that big media will declare her acceptance speech a home run, whether it is or not. Harris might even be leading Donald Trump before we reach the fall.

But her surge, however compelling it might appear, is built on a foundation of quicksand. Job one for the last-minute Kamala Harris campaign has been to feed the nation the assertion that she no longer supports the most extreme policies she championed in the last election cycle. The woman ranked as the single most liberal senator in the whole country in 2019 is now being presented as a sensible moderate. She no longer believes in defunding the police – after she raised money to bail out violent criminals in the summer of George Floyd. She no longer supports the total ban on fracking she championed in 2020. She called for eliminating private health insurance, supported decriminalizing illegal immigration, and provided taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegals. But now she has changed her mind about all those ideas.

She is, however, open to a conversation about banning plastic straws.

Rather than demonstrating leadership by de-escalating racial tensions during her time in the Senate, Harris frequently did the opposite. In one hearing, she drew parallels between the Ku Klux Klan and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency she later said should probably be canceled. And she fueled the fires of racial tension by declaring, “Black people have been treated as less than human in America.” The list goes on and on, but you get the point.

Kamala Denies Past Is Prologue

The insoluble problem is that all her radical statements and positions remain on the record. For those who believe Harris can effectively deny her words (as Joe Biden often did), twist them to seem anything but extreme, or claim they were taken out of context, remember that we live in the Internet age. Everything is archived. The charade that the VP has seen the light, “grown,” or reversed positions based on her “lived experience” – a favorite expression on the left, meaning we should take a powerful individual’s personal life journey into account in determining policy – will barely make it past Labor Day.

She positioned herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor when she ran for San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General, cleverly terming her philosophy not as tough on crime but rather “smart on crime.” Can’t be too tough in California, you know. But when she decided to step up the ladder to a Senate race, she began to go woke and morphed into the full-strength left-winger she identified as in her presidential run in 2020.

The result of these adjacent but opposite identities was branding herself post-2020 as a “progressive prosecutor,” a breathtaking contradiction in terms, an oxymoron for the ages. Voters can accept a candidate’s claim to be either a progressive or a prosecutor, but not both – not in an age where “progressive prosecutors” like Alvin Bragg and Letitia James are known for directly weaponizing their authority for political witch-hunts against the likes of Donald Trump and the NRA. Ms. Harris ought to remember that lawfare, in many ways, salvaged the Trump campaign.

Can Kamala Flip the Switch?

Can Kamala Harris prove the mockers wrong? Has she been underrated? Will her prosecutorial background make her an effective debater against Trump? Can she demonstrate gravitas when given the opportunity to do so on the national stage? Or is she every bit as progressive as conservatives claim? Is her track record of supporting every ascendant left-wing initiative, as she did in 2020, disqualifying? Could she lose in a landslide?

The fact is that we just don’t know. Kamala Harris was selected, not elected, by Democrats desperate to stabilize the shaky ground beneath them and attempt to reset the presidential race less than four months before Election Day. Since no candidate has ever been nominated this late in the game, we are in uncharted territory. Though the fundamentals of the race have not shifted dramatically, the months of Trump-Biden polling are now out the window. Harris is likely to gain support among traditional Democratic constituencies, especially black women and, to some degree, black men, who had soured on Biden, but Harris is a heavy lift for the moderate voters of the Midwest who put Biden in office.

The Democrats’ plan was likely to limit Harris to her vice presidential spot on the 2020 ticket and then have her compete in an open primary once Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second term. But, of course, he didn’t – and that threw off the party’s entire calculation. The result is a candidate who would have had a great deal of difficulty winning a competitive primary, as she demonstrated in 2020 when her own much-ballyhooed and generously funded campaign for president face-planted before the first contest.

Will the Real Kamala Please Stand Up?

It’s all right ahead of her now, her long-awaited chance to stop circling and break through on her own, unbound by playing second fiddle to a president best described as a rapidly depreciating asset. It is her chance to prove the mockers, who have bombarded her with ridicule, were wrong. She has the soon-to-be rapt attention of the American people.

She has been, to quote the iconic song Windmills of Your Mind, “like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel.” At some point, she must step off the spinning carousel and onto solid ground.

So, who is she? Which is she: the prosecutor so committed to law and order that she convicted almost 2,000 marijuana users and threw dozens of them in prison – or the progressive warrior who was all in on BLM and proposed to “reimagine how we do public safety in this country”? Those fundamental positions cannot be reconciled. Silver-tongued explanations will not suffice, especially when the Kamala being presented to us now is actually the second entire re-branding of the woman, the second time she has done an ideological 180 to depict herself as something other than what people perceive at the time.

A cardinal rule of politics is that you must define yourself because if you don’t, your opponent gladly will – and in a most unflattering way. If she cannot succeed in the excruciatingly difficult task of incorporating the many contradictions between her past and present into a coherent identity, Kamala Harris can rest assured that Donald Trump is eagerly waiting in the wings to do the job for her.