Harris’s ungainly effort to restyle herself as a zealous convert to centrism and moderation does not suit her well because her heart isn’t in the game. She issues perfunctory statements renouncing all the works and views espoused by Kamala Harris circa 2019 because she has to. Fracking? She’s for it. Gun buy-back programs? A paranoid right-wing fantasy. “Gender-reassignment” surgery for federal inmates? That wasn’t her idea in the first place. The “Green New Deal” and its boundless ambition to remake the entire American economy and social compact? Her “values have not changed,” even if the policy preferences those values once informed have undergone a radical revision.

This has been a rote exercise on Harris’s part. It is fueled by her understanding that Biden’s legacy is a millstone around her neck. But Democrats should take the imperative voters have imposed on them to its logical conclusion. Why is Biden’s record such a drag on Democratic prospects today? Because, as Harris’s scramble to the center of American politics suggests, the president deferred to the progressive Left, and today, they regret it.