James Antle of the Washington Examiner explains why Kamala Harris seeks to be “unburdened by what is her record.”

The border czar flap was just the beginning. 

Vice President Kamala Harris is carefully editing the public record to excise inconvenient parts of her time serving with President Joe Biden and the more controversial policy positions she took in her first run for the White House.

Sympathetic media have been willing to aid in this effort, retroactively correcting years-old references to Harris as border czar in their own reporting and contextualizing her discarded policy positions as the product of a progressive Democratic fever in 2019-20 that has since broken.

One news report about Harris’s revised position on fracking initially framed it as a response to a Republican accusation rather than a Harris reversal. (The headline was later updated.) Another lamented the “border confusion” that “haunts” Harris since she effectively took over as the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket.

Some in the liberal intelligentsia go further, arguing that an inherent advantage of bypassing a competitive, small-d democratic primary process this time around means that a new platform can be fashioned for the general election only.

“But I think the merit of skipping a primary is that you don’t need to make huge public promises to your base groups,” the liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias writes. “You need to write down a brief, realistic agenda of items the public wants to hear about.”

Yglesias put it another way on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter: “By skipping a primary you can skip the part of the election where you make lots of explicit cringey promises to various elements of your base and just write down a few popular issues to run on and tell everyone else to be chill.”

“Chill” in what way? Harris “should send a quiet emissary to the immigration advocacy community to tell them not to be idiots, that if a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill passes Congress, she’s obviously not going to veto it…. Was she the ‘border czar?’ Who cares!”