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

This is truly a Biden redux, and she’s hoping no one notices because he’s an old white guy and she’s not.

It’s easy to forget given the way he’s governed, but Biden campaigned on unity, just like Harris is campaigning on now.

In her closing remarks at the Ellipse, the vice president made a passionate call for unity. “What Donald Trump never understood,” she said, “is that “e pluribus unum, among many others, un” is not just a simple phrase on a bill. dollar. It is a living truth at the heart of our nation.

“It’s time,” she continued, “to stop pointing fingers. We need to stop pointing fingers and start shaking hands. It is time to turn the page on drama and conflict, fear and division.”

What she wants to turn the page on are four years that were supposed to be all about unity.

Biden said in his 2020 victory speech: “I am committed to being a president who seeks not to divide but to unify, who does not see red states and blue states, but only sees the United States . » He ran for president, he said, “to unite us here at home.”

Harris gave her own speech that evening as vice president-elect. She said voters chose “hope, unity, decency, science and, yes, the truth.” She hailed Biden as a “healer” and a “unifier.” She promised as vice president to work “to unite our country and heal the soul of our nation.”

It went so well that she now says the nation continues to desperately need her unifying ministries.

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

Upon taking office, Biden decided he was a world-historical figure whose mission was to move America as far to the left as possible. The few Democrats resisting his agenda were isolated and intimidated.

Biden has championed the progressive cause on almost everything, denouncing common-sense election reforms in Georgia as the return of Jim Crow and overstepping his legal authority to try to impose his priorities, an effort that continues today student loan forgiveness.

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

Harris did not express regret for this, nor explain how she would manage to deliver on her latest promises of unity after Biden clearly failed to deliver on his (and hers) from 2020.

The vice president’s idea of ​​finding consensus is to abandon her most radioactive positions from 2019 and 2020 and embrace everything Biden has done. That brings her closer to the center, but the problem is that Biden has had his greatest success in uniting the public. against his presidency.

In any case, unity is not a realistic, or even particularly desirable, goal. We are a deeply divided country and a great republic that is inherently divisive. Absent a major crisis or a transformative political genius elected president, the country does not come together.

Yet false calls for unity are at least as old as Thomas Jefferson, who declared in his inaugural address after the 1800 election: “We are all Republicans. We are all federalists.

Ultimately, the Biden-Harris vision of unity is that Donald Trump goes away.

There’s no doubt that Trump has contributed to our emotionally charged politics, but it’s not like Republicans are ever going to accept the priorities of Harris and Biden, nor should they.

Unity is a pipe dream and a cliché that Harris regurgitates in the absence of anything more compelling.

Twitter: @RichLowry