What Harris's opponents cast as "flip-flops" - and, yes, she has changed her positions on, among other issues, fracking and aspects of immigration policy - are about more than, say, the urgent need to carry Pennsylvania. They also reflect a progressive movement that found a way during the Biden years to manage the trade-offs that progress requires.(emphasis mine-EM)

Some might call these shifts "selling out" or, more blandly, "moving to the center." Neither formulation grasps one of the genuine achievements of Biden's presidency: He created policy coalitions that brought center and left together on behalf of incremental but significant changes with an eye toward more progress down the road. Harris is now the standard-bearer for that approach, a role she embraced on CNN with her praise of Biden's "extraordinary successes."

But it is Harris's political success over the last 40 days or so that has surprised so many who judged her primarily by her earlier quest for the party's nomination. But students of her rapid climb in California politics are getting exactly what they expected long ago. Her talent was so obvious that national Republicans, including George W. Bush's political maestro Karl Rove, tried to end her career before it got off the ground by spending $1 million on attack ads at the close of her 2010 campaign for state attorney general. She prevailed narrowly and went on to sweep her Senate race six years later.

[W]hat helped Harris soar this summer was Biden's outreach to the party's left and his effort to meld his own relatively moderate but strongly pro-labor politics with the aspirations of the party's progressive wing. The ideological and policy ground Harris had hoped to occupy four years ago is now the center of gravity in her party.

She's in this position because Democrats spent the last three years trying to get the politics of policy right. It was the necessary prelude to the opportunity Harris has to live up to her promise.

But for the often impatient generations following the Boomers, this type of pragmatism wins elections and allows Democrats to slowly move policy in a more progressive direction even though such change never happens at the speed or to the degree wanted by those unfamiliar with just how difficult it is for progressive policies to overcome our nation's built-in conservative advantages which give outsized power to a minority of Americans.

At the end of the day, it's always up to the People to keep pressure on their elected servants to enact the progressive policies that allow this nation to grow and flourish along with allowing individuals to do the same. It does not good to scream for a certain policy unless one can bring a majority of Americans along to force our politicians into action. Harris understands that it doesn't matter how good a policy might be it won't matter unless a majority coalesces to support it. The same holds true for the Harris/Walz ticket.