Lowry: Kamala Harris sells faux unity – yet again

Kamala Harris is avoiding being seen in public with President Joe Biden, for understandable reasons. That doesn't change the fact that she's running for Biden's second term, and doing it with Biden's old message.

It is truly Biden redux, and she's hoping that no one notices because he's an old white male and she's not.

It's easy to forget given how he governed, but Biden campaigned on unity, just as Harris is campaigning now.

In her "closing argument" speech at the Ellipsis, the vice president issued a passionate call for unity. "What Donald Trump has never understood," she said, "is that 'e pluribus unum, out of many, one' isn't just a phrase on a dollar bill. It is a living truth about the heart of our nation."

"It is time," she continued, "to stop pointing fingers. We have to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division."

What she wants to turn the page from is four years that were supposed to be all about unity in the first place.

Biden declared in his victory speech in 2020, "I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but unify, who doesn't see red states and blue states, only sees the United States." He sought the office of president, he maintained, "to unite us here at home."

Harris gave her own speech that night as vice president-elect. She said the voters had chosen "hope, unity, decency, science, and, yes, truth." She extolled Biden as "healer" and a "uniter." She promised as vice president to work "to unite our country and heal the soul of our nation."

It turned out so well that she now says the nation continues to be just as desperately in need of her unifying ministrations.

Maybe the definition of insanity should be repeatedly voting for unity and expecting different results.

Immediately upon taking office, Biden decided that he was a world-historical figure whose mission was to move America as far left as possible. The few Democratic holdouts against his agenda were isolated and browbeaten. Biden took up the progressive cause on nearly everything, denouncing common-sense voting reforms in Georgia as the return of Jim Crow and exceeding his legal authority to try to impose his priorities, an effort that continues to this day on student loan forgiveness.

If Biden had wanted to bring people together (or at least not drive them further apart), he could, at the bare minimum, have enforced the laws at the border and avoided creating an epochal crisis that has made immigration even more of a flash point in the national debate.

Harris hasn't expressed regret for any this, or explained how she'll succeed in fulfilling her latest pledges of unity after Biden so obviously failed to deliver on his (and hers) from 2020.

The vice president's idea of finding consensus is jettisoning her most radioactive positions from 2019 and 2020 and embracing everything Biden has done. This moves her closer to the center, but the problem is that Biden has had his greatest success uniting the public against his presidency.

Regardless, unity isn't a realistic, or even particularly desirable, goal. We are a bitterly divided country, and a big, inherently fractious republic. Absent a major crisis or a transformative political genius getting elected president, the country isn't coming together. Still, faux appeals to unity are at least as old as Thomas Jefferson, who said in his inaugural address after the 1800 election: "We are all Republicans. We are all Federalists."

At the end of the day, the Biden-Harris vision of unity is that Donald Trump goes away. There's no doubt that Trump has contributed to our emotionally super-charged politics, but it's not as though Republicans are ever going to agree to the Harris-Biden priorities, nor should they.

Unity is a chimera and cliche that Harris is regurgitating in the absence of anything more compelling.