President Joe Biden won the 2020 election on the premise that he could pose as good Joe from Scranton and not scare voters until the November election.

There, Biden spoke of “unity” and “competence,” backing away from his earlier, more radical primary campaign claims in which he pandered to left-leaning voters about ending fracking and opening the border.

But once elected president in 2020, Biden quickly became a front for Obama's far-left third term.

Gullible and naive voters were shocked to see their supposedly moderate candidate transform into a bona fide neo-socialist president.

Generally, the left acknowledges that wealth distribution, high taxes, big government, open borders, zero tolerance for crime, and woke DEI policies are unappealing to 51 percent of the population.

That reality makes disinformation necessary to implement left-wing policies.

No one voted for Biden-Harris, who has borrowed trillions of dollars to cause hyperinflation, waged war on fossil fuels, woke up, let in 10 million illegal immigrants, surrendered $50 billion worth of weapons to the terrorist Taliban, and found America facing existential wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and perhaps soon over Taiwan.

But to get leftists elected, they need to trick the American people into believing that their “moderate” campaign facade will continue after they take office – when in fact it never will.

So for now, Harris and her new running mate, Tim Walz, will likely keep all of their cherished left-wing positions in check, at least until November.

The two left-wing chameleons will temporarily assume the identity and policies of “moderates,” effectively admitting that they know the public doesn’t want any of their real policies.

This temporary transformation means that left-leaning candidates pretend to superficially agree with what most Americans support: energy independence, low taxes, limited government, a strong defense, a deterrent foreign policy, secure borders, legal immigration only, and assimilation rather than woke/DEI tribalism.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are some of the most brazen and extreme examples of left-wing duplicity in living memory.

But cartwheels will still be difficult for both of them.

Harris is totally incapable of coherent thought without a teleprompter or a staged interview, and Walz is a buffoon who shouted “couch” lies about J.D. Vance in his first speech as a candidate and then foolishly bragged about them.

Until recently, Harris prided herself on being one of California's most radical politicians in living memory, running a far-left, polarizing campaign against Biden in the 2020 presidential election that resulted in her failing to win a single Democratic delegate.

Now she has chosen the nation's most left-wing governor as her running mate. During the long summer of 2020, Walz allowed Black Lives Matter and Antifa to run wild in Minnesota while his new partner, Harris, funded bail for people jailed for violent acts.

Like Harris, Walz has done all he can to block pipeline construction and reduce fossil fuel use.

“Democrats fall flat” when they see an electoral map painted red, he once boasted, “but in those red areas there are usually rocks and cows.”

His advice to Democrats, it seems, was to just win in cities and not worry about alienating rural Minnesota, where there are fewer voters. This is the blueprint for the 2024 campaign.

The irony was a further development of Barack Obama's dismissal of rural Pennsylvanians as “clingy” and Hillary Clinton's denouncing of the rural working class as “deplorables.”

By choosing the far-left Waltz, Harris is reminding the public who is running the Democratic Party, which is gearing up for a far-left, neo-socialist administration while Harris and Waltz are deceiving the public into believing they are temporary moderates and will be fooling them for the next 90 days.

Like Joe Biden, who struggled with cognitive problems in 2020, the rhetorical Harris will likely be limited to campaigning due to her cautious entourage.

Instead, she plans to outfundraise Trump, count on off-Election Day votes, portray herself as a centrist and hire bombastic surrogates like Waltz to paint Trump as a criminal extremist.

But if this initial shift by Harris and Waltz was embarrassing, their next left turn after November would be shameless and dangerous to the country.

In 2025, under a Harris-Waltz administration, the border will magically disappear again, and millions more illegal immigrants will once again flock to the United States.

Printing trillions more dollars would lead to even more hyperinflation, while cutting defense spending would provoke even more wars in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

More awakening and DEI mandates will ensure more tribal discord.

Harris-Waltz would seek to make good on earlier promises to ban fracking and horizontal drilling, making the U.S. vulnerable to hostile foreign oil producers, distancing the U.S. from Israel and appeasing Biden’s coddling of Iran.

They will continue the insane left-wing war on the Supreme Court and carry out Biden's plan to cripple it.

But for now?

Harris-Waltz's message was clear: “I'm going to have to lie and deceive you for the next three months in order to run your country for the next four years.”

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of World War II: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, published by Basic Books. He can be contacted at authorvdh@gmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.