The Reinvention of Kamala Harris

Operation Transfiguration may be the most audacious plan a political party has ever undertaken.

Ms.

Harris’s political identity as the most liberal member of a Senate that included Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; a presidential campaign five years ago in which she pledged to eliminate private health insurance, ban fracking, give benefits to illegal immigrants, and force gun owners to sell certain firearms to the government; more recent recollections of her San Francisco-bred extremism such as when she helped raise money for the legal defense of rioters and looters in the summer of 2020; and her role in helping Mr. Biden deliver a long list of economic, social and national-security failures for the country—most obviously at the border.

All this is why so many Democrats were alarmed at the thought of a Harris nomination, the same nomination they now trumpet as triumphant.

If the election is decided on the issues, on voters’ perceptions of the state of the country, Ms. Harris is surely in as much trouble as Mr. Biden was.

If the campaign is dominated by pointless assertions about Ms. Harris’s racial identity or her maternal status or all the other entertaining little diversions Mr.

Trump likes to indulge, she may get away with skating past the realities of her past.