The clumsy rebranding of Kamala Harris

US Vice President Kamala Harris, newly tasked by the Democratic Party to run against ex-president Donald Trump at this year’s US presidential election, spent her first week as a candidate trying to outrun her political past.

Her vigorous rebranding – occurring during one of the strangest episodes in recent US political history with Joe Biden’s still unexplained and sudden exit from the race and the assassination attempt on Trump – seems bent on fitting Harris into a mainstream Democratic Party mold.

In this quick change of course, there are some issues best not to mention. One big rebranding effort has involved a rewrite of Harris’s role as the top Biden administration official tasked with curbing uncontrolled migration into the US across the Mexican border.

Harris’s associates insist that she was never actually Biden’s “border czar,” i.e. someone who would propose changes to immigration rules. Rather, the new version suggests she was simply on a high-level gathering of information about the root causes of migrant traffic – and then only on migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico.

Last week, Jason Marczak, a Latin America expert who accompanied Harris on the Central America and Mexico trip, provided an updated description of Harris’s mission. “Harris sought out new ideas to inform the administration’s strategy on topics ranging from transparency and economic development to security and good governance,” he wrote on Atlantic Council website.

Marczak said she also spoke with Caribbean leaders along those same lines. He made no mention of the steady flow of migrants from countries far from the Americas, including Afghanistan, Iran, China and countries in Africa.

Her actual enthusiasm even in the shrunken