As Vice President Harris races to Election Day, she’s presenting different faces to the public in hopes they’ll find one appealing. The strategy may work, or voters may come to regard her as a political changeling without core beliefs — a flaw that has doomed both candidates and presidencies in the past.

“I want to be liked,” Woody Allen says as Leonard Zelig, subject of the 1983 film “Zelig.” Dubbed “the human chameleon,” Zelig adopts the appearances of those around him. It’s funny in fiction, but being branded a “flip-flopper,” as Secretary Kerry was in 2004, can prove fatal to ambition.