FORTY-SEVEN DAYS. “We don’t have ‘Election Day’ in this country anymore — we have election month,” said David Plouffe, a top adviser to the Kamala Harris campaign, in Chicago on Thursday. “So you don’t have 77 days. You basically have 47 days” until people start early voting in the presidential election. Harris did not become a candidate until late July, when a group of Democratic power brokers muscled President Joe Biden out of the campaign. She’s an instant candidate, but she comes with a troubling, 3 1/2-year record as vice president of the United States. Now, Democrats want to use the abbreviated campaign to introduce Harris to voters as if she were an entirely new product. “It’s a unique circumstance,” Plouffe told Axios in an interview at the Democratic National Convention.

Earlier, Plouffe, the former Obama campaign chief whose arrival signaled the growing Obamafication of the Harris team, told the Michigan delegation that “the short campaign benefits Kamala Harris in a lot of ways.” The grueling work that makes up a presidential campaign — the speeches, the glad-handing, the news conferences, the interviews, the travel, the debates, the courting of interest groups, the policy positions — Harris gets to skip an entire year of that. More than a year, actually. If her campaign is aggressive — and Plouffe and his colleagues are nothing if not aggressive — they might be able to create a new Harris, unburdened by the unpleasant facts of her service as vice president and with a hazy, selective history of her earlier life.