The Vice President is the least known presidential nominee in modern times.

Opinion Review & Outlook The Selling of Kamala Harris The Vice President is the least known presidential nominee in modern times. By The Editorial Board Aug. 21, 2024 5:42 pm ET 3932 Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at the campaign rally Tuesday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 20, 2024. Photo: kamil krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Kamala Harris takes the Chicago stage on Thursday in the culmination of one of the most audacious bets in recent political history: That in 100 days Democrats can turn the co-pilot of an unpopular Presidency into the reincarnation of Barack Obama’s movement for hope and change. On present course they might even pull it off. *** That’s the message that Michelle and Barack Obama were selling as they extolled Ms. Harris in their Tuesday speeches in Chicago. And it’s no accident that the Vice President has recruited Mr. Obama’s campaign operatives to advise, if not entirely take over, her campaign. Out go the bad memories of her association with Joe Biden, and in come the gauzy slogans about “our future,” the “contagious power of hope,” and “fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion.” Ms. Harris is no longer the Vice President who failed to secure the border. She’ll now be tough on illegal migration. She’s no longer the Veep who said “Bidenomics is working” while inflation reached a 40-year high. She’s now the candidate who will reduce your family’s food bill by going after your grocer for “price gouging.” She’s no longer the candidate of 2020 who questioned the need for cash bail and blamed police for urban violence. She’s now the tough prosecutor who as California Attorney General dared to investigate . . . Exxon. She’s no longer the presidential candidate of 2019 who wanted to ban fracking, endorsed Medicare for All, and questioned whether the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should exist. Her campaign suggests she’s changed her views on all that, although she hasn’t said why—or even been asked. Americans are expected to take her expedient leap from the left to the center on faith. The Democratic Party has a history of nominating candidates who are relatively unknown and offer hope and change.

he difference this time is that all of those men were more vetted than Ms. Harris, who was handed the Democratic nomination without a primary contest.

On domestic policy, it’s possible to infer that she’d pursue President Biden’s agenda, perhaps even more aggressively. Her few distinctive policy hints so far suggest she is a California progressive who favors higher taxes and even greater spending to complete the President’s Build Back Better agenda. But she has largely avoided specific proposals that carry a price tag and open her to criticism. This is no doubt by design as she runs a campaign about “vibes.”

Perhaps Ms. Harris has qualities of leadership we haven’t observed. Vice Presidents called on unexpectedly have sometimes risen to the occasion, as Harry Truman and Gerald Ford did. Perhaps, too, she will show some of those qualities in Thursday’s speech or in the campaign to come. But so far she is a vessel for the triumph of hope over experience, whom Americans are expected to embrace mainly because she isn’t Donald Trump.

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