Politics remains endlessly fascinating because of its impossible mix of the inevitable and the unexpected — sometimes in the same doubly impossible moment. Take Vice President Kamala Harris for example, easily the most craven contender to serve as the Democrats' standard-bearer since the last one.
All of us had some fun at Harris' expense on Monday, thanks to a little satire I wrote for you about her pathetic attempts to distance herself from the Biden-Harris record of "achievements" while also blaming Donald Trump for them. If you read Harris' quotes — which I did not make up for Monday's column — you'd think Trump had been president for the last four years.
Inflation? Trump's fault. Record house prices? Trump's fault. Slouching towards World War III? Trump's fault. Border chaos? Trump's fault.
And that brings us to today's flip-flop, coming close on the heels of Harris doing the Triple Lindy on banning fracking, gun confiscation, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, decreasing funding for the Border Patrol, eliminating private health insurance, Medicare for All, court-packing SCOTUS, defunding police, Green New Deal, EV mandates, and (I'm running out of breath here) a federal jobs guarantee.
Harris wants to build the wall.
Somebody get her a red MAGA hat, won't you?
No, wait — the New York Post already did that for us.
You'd think I've got to be making this one up, but no: Harris flip-flops on building the border wall.
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"Harris is embracing a more hawkish immigration policy as Donald Trump's campaign spends tens of millions of dollars attacking her about the border," Axios reported late Tuesday.
More:
Harris was against the wall — but not in a Ceaușescu way — before she was for it.
Snark aside, there's an important lesson here in the way Democrats operate and how their voters do, too.
Every presidential candidate tacks to the center after the primaries. Whether you want to call it hypocritical or not, it's just a fact of political life. Mostly, tacking is a matter of deemphasizing the issues your primary constituents care about and focusing more on the issues centrist general election voters care about.
But Harris has done one 180-degree flip after another on core issues that Democrats care about. Probably the only position she wouldn't try debasing herself on would be abortion. And her voters will lap it up, confident that the flip-flops are just for the rubes and that she'll flop-flip right back to deliver on the most radical parts of her agenda.
We keep asking, "Who is the real Kamala Harris?" but the answer might be that there isn't one.