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This week, I look at Vice President Kamala Harris’s ability to defy critics, pick the distinguished people of the week and share a new D.C. exhibit.

The media, political insiders, former Republicans and even members of Harris’s own party have underestimated her abilities to carve policy positions and reconsolidate the Democratic base.

Most prominently, she has been consistently criticized for failing to articulate her economic vision. However, in two speeches — one in Raleigh, N.C., last month and one in Pittsburgh on Wednesday (where she identified herself as a capitalist seeking “bold, persistent experimentation”) — as well as numerous campaign events, she has delineated a set of serious, concrete policies. These include: restoring the child tax credit; creating a $6,000 credit for the parents of newborns in their baby’s first year; stimulating the housing market; subsidizing first-time home buyers; eliminating unnecessary college degree requirements for federal jobs; subsidizing child care (thereby limiting child-care costs to 7 percent of lower-wage earners’ income); raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent; and expanding the tax credit for start-up businesses to $50,000 (with the goal of 25 million new business applications by the end of her first term). In Pittsburgh, she added new economic policy positions: become the global leader in everything from artificial intelligence to clean energy to aerospace to biomanufacturing; double the number of paid apprenticeships; reform tax laws to allow more employee profit-sharing; incentivize investment in factory towns; and cut red tape in permitting for construction.

This week, the White House announced that “the economy has grown by 3.2 percent per year during Biden-Harris administration — even stronger than previously estimated — and better than the first three years of the........

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