People will start sizing up Kamala Harris as a possible presidential candidate here in the next few seconds, and I imagine we’re going to hear some version of this sentence a lot on cable news this week: Well, she ran for president once before, and she ran such a bad race that she didn’t even make it to Iowa, withdrawing before a single vote was even cast.

That is true. She did run a bad race. There are a couple of lessons to be learned from it. For starters, she should make sure her best debate zinger—aimed, remember, at Joe Biden—is not a defense of a deeply unpopular 50-year-old policy (busing) that, a few days after the debate, her aides could not defend. So there’s that.

However, I’d argue today that that race is largely irrelevant to this one, assuming she’s the candidate (which I’ll discuss a bit below, but which I do believe we can assume). There are a couple of key reasons why.

First of all, she doesn’t have to build this campaign from the ground up. The Biden campaign has a staff of thousands in place. Some of them won’t want to work for Harris, but I’d imagine most of them will. Granted, she’ll need to bring in her........

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