Who is Kamala Harris?

The moment Sen. Kamala Harris launched her campaign for her party's presidential nomination, I wondered if she'd been conjured in a DNC lab. That's just how perfect — and how artificial — she seemed. She was articulate, telegenic, charismatic, sassy, proudly progressive, and an avatar of the party's multicultural future. But she was also transparently calculating, ruthlessly desperate for a big break, and impossible to pin down on policy.

Let's just say that nothing in the 11 months of her campaign brought the real Harris into focus — or did anything to indicate there was any "real" Harris there to discover. She never looked or sounded like anything other than a top-tier candidate. But was she the tough New Democrat prosecutor she showed herself to be as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California? Or was she, instead, a liberal Democrat with one of the most progressive voting records in the Senate? Was she a firebrand in favor of racial reform who clocked Joe Biden upside the head in a debate for his opposition to busing back in the 1970s? Or was she the irresolute politician who backed away from the onslaught a few days later? Was she the passionate advocate for Medicare-for-all she sometimes seemed to be on the campaign trail? Or the unprincipled trimmer who spent the rest of her time explaining that this was not quite, but sort of was, but really wasn't her position?

Which Kamala Harris will voters see and hear and start getting to know on Wednesday night? Or will she somehow try to be all of them — standing in for a generic Democrat, somewhat like the man at the top of the ticket, but for a slightly more left-leaning, multiethnic variation on the party's image of itself? Whatever the answer turns out to be, she'd be well-advised to try sticking with it for the next three months.

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