Forty-seven days

FORTY-SEVEN DAYS. "We don't have 'Election Day' in this country anymore — we have election month," said David Plouffe, a top adviser to the Kamala Harris campaign, in Chicago on Thursday. "So you don't have 77 days. You basically have 47 days" until people start early voting in the presidential election. Harris did not become a candidate until late July, when a group of Democratic power brokers muscled President Joe Biden out of the campaign. She's an instant candidate, but she comes with a troubling, 3 1/2-year record as vice president of the United States. Now, Democrats want to use the abbreviated campaign to introduce Harris to voters as if she were an entirely new product. "It's a unique circumstance," Plouffe told Axios in an interview at the Democratic National Convention.

Earlier, Plouffe, the former Obama campaign chief whose arrival signaled the growing Obamafication of the Harris team, told the Michigan delegation that "the short campaign benefits Kamala Harris in a lot of ways." The grueling work that makes up a presidential campaign — the speeches, the glad-handing, the news conferences, the interviews, the travel, the debates, the courting of interest groups, the policy positions — Harris gets to skip an entire year of that. More than a year, actually. If her campaign is aggressive — and Plouffe and his colleagues are nothing if not aggressive — they might be able to create a new Harris, unburdened by the unpleasant facts of her service as vice president and with a hazy, selective history of her earlier life.

That is what the final night of the Democratic National Convention was about. Democrats don't have long to sell the all-new Harris, and the convention was their best opportunity to get started. It succeeded. With all of Hollywood, the rest of the entertainment industry, and most of the news media on its side, the Democratic Party can put on a show.

"The people who will decide this election don't know that much about her," Plouffe told the Michigan crowd. That is Harris's big advantage. If her campaign succeeds, all the public will learn about Harris is what Plouffe & Co. want them to learn in the space of a few weeks.

But if Democrats have 47 days to sell the new Harris, then Republicans have 47 days to reveal the real Harris. Democrats want the people to make an impulse purchase. Republicans want voters to think before they buy. That will be the story of the next 47 days.

As is standard at conventions, the Harris campaign produced a biographical video of Harris that played before her speech on the final night. Such videos are valuable because they distill the points a campaign wants to make about a candidate. They're especially designed for those voters who "don't know that much about" Harris, as Plouffe said.

As far as Harris's professional life is concerned, the video covered her time as a prosecutor by portraying her as putting "violent criminals and sexual predators in prison" — an assertion that needs context, as the fact-checkers say. That was followed by a brief mention of her brief time in the Senate — she was sworn in in January 2017 and was running for president by January 2019.

Then came the section on Harris's vice presidency. It claimed that she 1) capped insulin costs for older people, 2) helped replace lead pipes and provide clean water to communities, 3) helped create 16 million jobs, 4) fought gun violence, 5) "traveled the world to strengthen our national security," 6) helped unite NATO in defense of Ukraine, and 7) "led the fight for reproductive freedom."

The two biggest items left off the list just happen to be the two biggest concerns of voters in 2024. One is Harris's role in the disastrous Biden economic policy that helped feed inflation and made it far more difficult for millions of people to buy the basics of life, such as groceries. The other is Harris's role in the even more disastrous Biden policy on the U.S-Mexico border, in which the administration allowed more than 7 million unvetted migrants to stay in the U.S. after crossing the border illegally.

There are, of course, a lot more questions about Harris's time as vice president. The campaign left them out of the picture, too. Its working theory appears to be that the bad things that have happened in the last few years are the work of Donald Trump and not the Democratic president and vice president. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan noted that the Harris/Democratic convention producers "cast a magic conjuring sorcery spell in which viewers got the feeling the whole purpose of the Democratic Party is to break away from a grim and doom-laden reigning regime ... when they've been in charge for 3 1/2 years.”

So now the short campaign begins. The structure of the race stacks the deck in Harris's favor, and that's before discussing issues like biased media coverage. In any event, whatever the circumstances, it is Trump's job to organize a sharp, focused, and hourly effort to show voters the real Harris — not the new model created for a quickie run to the White House.