(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party, or candidate, on the part of Newsmax.)
Avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was remarkably candid in admitting that his ideological protégé V.P. Kamala Harris will promise anything necessary to become elected president.
When questioned by NBC’s “Meet the Press” about Harris’s recent changing positions on progressive policies, Sanders replied, “No, I think she’s “doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”
Harris had similarly defended her flip-flopping, telling CNN in her first major sit-down after clinching her nomination that her “values have not changed.”
So, what exactly, does that all mean to voters who might have very good reasons to wonder which Kamala is running for the nation’s highest office: the radical far-left career politician we know, or trust the proclaimed new version with a fresh vision of joy unburdened by what has been?
Take her recent switcheroo on no longer opposing a fracking ban, for example, a particularly urgent issue in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania where a March Commonwealth Foundation poll found that 82% of residents care greatly that affordable fossil energy is slipping away.
Keep in mind that the older Kamala version spent four years with an administration that has attempted to regulate oil and gas extraction and pipelines of business, moving toward a fracking ban in everything but name.
During her ABC debate with former President Trump, Harris claimed credit for "the largest increase in domestic oil production in history."
Not mentioned was the reality that since 2021, U.S. oil production has increased by 2.1 million barrels daily, versus 4 million during Trump's first three years before the pandemic caused prices to plunge and then later bounce back after the slump under Biden-Harris.
Almost all of that production increase has occurred on private and state land in Texas’s Permian Basin from tapping what are known as “drilled but uncompleted wells.”
These are wells that were drilled previously but not fracked, in part due to uncertain market demand.
Meanwhile, Biden and Harris have been strangling oil and gas with punitive mandates that when fully enacted and enforced will raise costs and likely force them to plug wells that still have productive life while pausing on liquefied natural gas export permits and shoveling taxpayer money at wind and solar boondoggles.
On top of this, eased sanctions on oil from Iran and Venezuela by their administration has increased their production nearly as much as the U.S. has increased its production.
Harris wasn't asked during her Trump debate whether she still supports a de facto government mandate to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 despite nearly half of all current electric vehicle owners indicating plans to switch back to petroleum vehicles at a time when manufacturers are losing money on each EV produced.
Then when Trump attributed rising crime rates largely to an invasion of many millions of illegal migrants allowed into the country on Harris' watch, "World News Tonight" anchor David Muir interjected: "President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down."
Trump fired back with his own fact check that "they didn't include the cities with the worst crime," referencing the 2022 omission of data from Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago.
Regarding her role as the Biden-Harris administration's spectacularly failed "border czar," as president would she implement her previous pledge to decriminalize illegal border crossings?
And what about her former positions favoring the defunding of police, ending cash bailouts for apprehended criminal suspects, mandatory gun buybacks from honest citizens and taxpayer-funded surgeries for transgender inmates?
We also don't know if she still supports her previous vows to impose universal government healthcare for all — including illegal migrants — that eliminates private health insurance.
As she now tells it, Kamala has turned into a regular Rambo regarding firearm ownership, telling Oprah Winfrey that both she and her V.P pick Tim Walz are gun owners and we're not taking anybody's guns away,” adding that “if someone breaks into my home … they’re gonna get shot!”
V.P Harris has also softened on a mandatory gun buyback program she supported as "a good idea" while running for president in 2019 which her current aides reportedly suggested dropping,
This is all quite a change of aim from the time in May 2007 when San Francisco’s then-District Attorney Harris told a group of reporters that under a new law she helped to draft that authorities could "walk into" homes of legal gun owners to inspect whether they were storing their firearms properly.
A recent survey by The New York Times and Siena College found that 60% of likely voters said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction and that they didn't know enough about where Harris stands on several key issues.
Meanwhile, we're urged to forget that while Kamala and Joe were joined at the hip regarding the same policy priorities and disasters over the past four years, we should nevertheless expect a better outcome this time.
In the end, the November election will be a competition between a candidate who is unburdened by her failed performance imagining a future in which she follows the same policies and a candidate with proven achievements who made life better and could do so again.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.