It has been generally accepted that whomever Joe Biden ended up selecting as his running mate would have a better-then-even shot at becoming president sometime within the next four years should the former vice president win in November. That’s so, given his advanced age (he will be 78 if he is inaugurated in January, which would make him the oldest person ever to take the office) and increasingly apparent cognitive deterioration. So,that person warrants a closer look than would traditionally be afforded a presidential running mate.

That person is Sen. Kamala Harris, as Biden announced earlier this week. The conventional wisdom is that she was selected as a moderate, setting the ticket up for a play to the center during the general election.

So, is she a moderate? Well, maybe, depending what your yardstick for measuring moderation is. Compared to AOC or Xi Jinping, sure, she fits that bill.

But not by nearly any other measure. During the Democratic primary she ran to left of Biden, who ran to the left of himself. The Biden campaign may point out that she ran to right of Sanders — and maybe she did, though there was little distance between the policies she was claiming support for and the ones that he or Elizabeth Warren advocated. Harris was an early and prominent supporter of both Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal, for instance, before carefully backing off upon learning that those levels of fanaticism and economic suicide were not as palatable as she apparently assumed they would be.

There are other hints of fanaticism evidenced during the primary that she has not backed off from, though. Most worrisome is probably her utter disregard for the Constitution as anything other than a quaint, if mildly contemptible, historic artifact. During one of the primary debates, she outlined her plan to enact a nationwide ban on “assault” firearms through executive order, to which none other than Biden was lucid enough to point out was an action well outside the purview and legal authority granted to the president by the Constitution. It’s a notion she rather ostentatiously scoffed at.

This is the sort of autocracy that, paradoxically, is appealing to the revolutionary crowd while at the same time approaches the levels of magisterial authoritarianism that some on the left still like to pretend that President Trump aspires to. Granted, he has flirted with the same mindset, such as with the absurd comment about postponing the election and his affinity for governing through executive order that at times flatters through imitation that of Barack Obama or Jared Polis.

Those who cherish the tradition of governmental neutrality on matters of faith ought to be concerned as well. One recalls her suggestion that Brian Buescher, while he was being considered for the U.S. District Court for Nebraska, was unfit for office because of the outrageous and unforgivable crime of belonging to a Catholic service group, the Knights of Columbus.

Coloradans have special cause to worry about someone like Harris being so close to the tiller of the presidency. While she may (we think) have backed off of full embrace of every ridiculous tenet of the Green New Deal during the primary, it is useful to remember that she was an original co-sponsor of the chimerical program in the Senate. Last fall she released a major climate plan that was essentially a paean to the ideological playground of environmental justice and promised a cool $10 trillion to be spent on everything from persecuting private businesses for alleged “climate crimes” to vague commitments to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Notably, the plan includes a provision for “immediately halting all new fossil fuel leases on federal lands,” i.e., one of the last few tenuous lifelines still dangling out there for Colorado’s West Slope. She has yet to publicly rescind her call for a nationwide ban on hydraulic fracturing and has declared her willingness to work toward eliminating the Senate filibuster in order to force through the Green New Deal.

If the hint of moderation lurks in her energy policy, it is certainly well concealed.

There is no denying Sen. Harris’ political talents, which were well displayed particularly during the first Democratic primary debate last fall, and which have held her in good stead as a career politician. And it is somewhat unfair to suggest that she was picked solely on the basis of checking the right “intersectional” boxes as it were. But if the Biden campaign selected her as a way to play to the center, then their political calibrations are as askew as their critics suggest.