VICTOR DAVID HANSON: The Harris flop would be scarier than her flip

Joe Biden won in 2020 on the premise that, until the November election, he would pose as good ol’ Joe from Scranton and not scare voters.

So Biden talked about “unity” and “competency.” He erased his prior wild primary pandering to left-wing voters about shutting down fracking and opening the border.

But as soon as he was elected in 2020, Biden became the leftist veneer for a hyper-radical Obama third term. Fooled and naïve voters were shocked that their supposedly moderate candidate turned into a veritable neo-socialist president.

In general, the left acknowledges that its spread-the-wealth, high taxes, big government, open borders, soft on crime and woke DEI agendas don’t appeal to 51 percent of the people. That reality requires disinformation for leftist policies to be implemented.

No one voted for the Biden-Harris ticket to borrow trillions sparking hyperinflation, to wage war on fossil fuels, to go woke, to welcome in 10 million illegal aliens, to abandon $50 billion in weapons to the terrorist Taliban and to find America facing existential wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and soon perhaps over Taiwan.

But getting leftists elected requires fooling the American people into thinking their “moderate” campaign veneers will continue into their presidencies — even though they never do.

So, for now, Harris and her new vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, will smother all their cherished left-wing positions — at least until November. The two left-wing chameleons will assume the temporary identities and policies of “moderates.” That is a de facto admission that they know that the public does not want any of their true agendas.

The temporary metamorphosis means that the leftist nominees superficially feign agreement with what most Americans support — energy independence, low taxes, limited government, strong defense, deterrent foreign policy, secure borders, legal-only immigration and assimilation rather than woke/DEI tribalism.

Harris and Walz are the most brazen and extreme examples of left-wing flip-floppers in memory. But for both, the cartwheeling will still be difficult.

Harris is utterly incapable of articulating a coherent thought without a teleprompter or a staged interview. Walz is a buffoon who, in his first speech as the nominee, screamed out the “couch” lie about J.D. Vance and then stupidly bragged of his falsehood.

Harris, until recently, was proud that she had been one of the most radical California politicians in memory. She ran such a hard-left, polarizing presidential bid against Biden in 2020 that she could not capture even a single Democrat delegate. Now she has selected as her vice president pick the most left-wing governor in the nation. Walz, during the long 2020 summer of rioting, allowed BLM and antifa to run amok in Minnesota while his new partner, Harris, raised bail for those jailed for violence.

Walz, like Harris, has done his best to stop pipelines and curtail fossil fuels. He once boasted that “Democrats go into depression” when they see electoral maps shaded in red, “but it’s mostly rocks and cows that are in that red area.” Apparently, his advice for Democrats was just to win urban areas and don’t sweat alienating greater rural Minnesota regions where fewer voters live — a blueprint for their 2024 campaign.

That snark was an expansion of Barack Obama’s dismissal of rural Pennsylvanians as “clingers” and Hillary Clinton’s trashing of the rural working class as “deplorables.”

By selecting the hard-left Walz, Harris reminds the nation who runs the Democratic Party. It is preparing for a hard-left neo-socialist administration — while it seeks to deceive the public for the next 90 days that Harris-Walz are temporary moderates.

Like the cognitively challenged Biden in 2020, word-salad Harris won’t be let out to campaign much by her wary handlers. Instead, she will outraise Trump, count on non-Election Day balloting, pose as a centrist and let her surrogates, such as the blowhard Walz, brand Trump as a criminal extremist.

But if the current initial Harris-Walz flipping is embarrassing, their eventual post-November flopping back to the left will be shameless — and dangerous for the nation.

In 2025, under a Harris-Walz presidency, borders would again magically evaporate. Millions more illegal aliens would regroup and flood into the United States

Printing more trillions of dollars would spike more hyperinflation. Cutting defense would further encourage even more wars in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

More woke and DEI mandates would ensure more tribal disunity.

Harris-Walz would try fulfilling earlier promises to ban fracking and horizontal drilling, render the United States vulnerable to hostile foreign oil producers, distance us from Israel and out-appease Biden’s coddling of Iran.

They would continue the crazy left-wing war on the Supreme Court and implement Biden’s plan to neuter it.

But for now? The Harris-Walz message is clear: “In order to run your country for the next four years, we must lie and deceive you for the next three months.”

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.