Everyone wants to be a centrist now.

It’s all the rage.

Now if an ordinary person, say a friend of yours, changed positions on major issues, they would probably offer you an explanation. But politicians play by a different set of rules. 

After a primary season in which both Donald Trump and now Kamala Harris have been laser-focused on riling up their base, both are edging–in some cases sprinting–toward the center.

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Political theft is not a crime, or the jails would be packed to capacity. 

Harris, in Las Vegas, blatantly ripped off Trump’s proposal to bar taxes on tips to service workers.

The focus has been on the vice president, not just because she’s new to the race but because she has studiously avoided the press until her sitdown with CNN’s Dana Bash. She does regularly come back on the plane for off-the-record sessions, with each reporter present getting a question. But obviously that’s of limited value to the rest of us.

The larger problem for Harris is that she has a host of far-left positions she took in her 2020 presidential run that she had abandoned without explanation.

These include the abolition of private health insurance (under Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All); her past opposition to fracking, and embrace of decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

Her repeated refrain; “My values have not changed.”

On fracking, Harris told CNN, “I made clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking as vice president.” That is not true. She said Joe Biden would not ban fracking. 

The VP did offer something of an explanation, that the administration had created over 300,000 clean energy jobs and “that tells me…we can do it without banning fracking.”

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Bash cited another blast from the past: “There was a debate. You raised your hand when asked whether or not the border should be decriminalized. Do you still believe that?”

Harris: “I believe there should be consequences. We have laws that have to be followed and enforced, that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally.” No mention of why she shifted her stance.

What Kamala is doing is what most general-election candidates do: moving toward the center. Whatever she thought matched the mood of the country in 2019, including her earlier career as a prosecutor, is clearly untenable today.

But on the Republican side, Trump is doing the same thing. It’s just getting less attention because he makes plenty of other news, from the Arlington Cemetery flap to personal attacks on Harris.

(Kate Medley for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This has been most visible on abortion, which has become a difficult subject for Republicans. On one level, Trump owns the issue, because it was his three Supreme Court justices who enabled the overturning of Roe after a half-century of precedent.

But now he’s said that Florida’s 6-week ban on the procedure is too short, that he believes there need to be more weeks. There was some backtracking on whether he’d support a competing initiative in the state, but not on the comments about 6 weeks, when many women don’t know they’re pregnant.

When I interviewed the former president at Mar-a-Lago, he indicated he would favor a 15- or 16-week abortion ban – but decided at the state level, under the SCOTUS ruling. 

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“He also declared that “my administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” This has triggered a backlash among some pro-life groups, who now deem Trump essentially pro-choice.

Trump is basically sliding to the center, to make his position more palatable to a wider range of voters, especially women, even though he has boasted about the repeal of Roe. 

(In that Mar-a-Lago interview, I asked Trump why he changed his mind on TikTok after trying to ban the Chinese-owned app as president. He said that would help Facebook, which he’s more concerned about, and of course TikTok has an enthusiastic base of younger users.)

Over the weekend, Trump said he would back another Florida measure, to legalize recreational use of marijuana. He said the state should not “ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars” by prosecuting people who possess small amounts for personal use. Again, a move toward a more moderate position that has drawn flak from some conservatives. 

Kamala accused him of, well, a flip-flop. She said that as president his Justice Department cracked down on pot smokers.

Part of what’s going on is that both candidates ignore the timing of past stances for political benefit. A Trump ad has Harris saying “Everyday prices are too high. Food, rent, gas, back-to-school clothes,” edited into “Bidenomics is working.” 

Harris was talking about high prices caused by the pandemic in a speech last month, and “Bidenomics” was from a speech last year when she was reacting to a monthly jobs report. 

Kamala says Trump is pushing Project 2025, although he disavowed the Heritage project early on and repeatedly (though it’s staffed by many of his former White House aides).

Moving to the center is an art form, and that’s what both candidates are attempting right now.

Robert Burke won the Republican nomination for Massachusetts’ eighth congressional district Tuesday night by a wide margin against two other GOP hopefuls.

The videographer will face an uphill battle against incumbent Democrat Stephen Lynch, who ran unopposed in his Tuesday primary. Lynch, who is vying for his 12th full term, has been representing Massachusetts’ eighth congressional district since 2013. He currently has over $1 million cash-on-hand.

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Meanwhile, Burke has not indicated any money raised, according to the Federal Election Commission’s election finance database.   

Burke previously challenged Lynch in the 2022 general election. He received just 30 percent of the vote that year, while Lynch garnered the remaining 70 percent.

Burke is a sports videographer from Milton, Mass., who attended the College of the Holy Cross and spent time as a federal probation officer, according to his campaign website. Burke has also been an entrepreneur, starting a cleaning business before undertaking his current business venture as a videographer.

Voters fill out their ballots at a polling station during Massachusetts state primary voting on Tuesday.

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Democrats have a strong hold on Massachusetts’ congressional delegation, with all nine House seats and both Senate seats currently under their control.

‘I Voted’ stickers sit on a table at a polling station in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts’ eighth congressional district is located along the state’s eastern shore. Biden won this Boston-area district in 2020 with 67 percent of the vote. 

Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is expected to win the state this year as well, and has been endorsed by both of the states’ Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey.

In the wake of the deaths of six Israeli hostages, including a California-born U.S. citizen, both the Israeli government and the Palestinian militant group Hamas are signaling hardened postures that pose a wrenching new challenge for the Biden administration.

For weeks, U.S. officials have said they were near a final agreement between Israel and Hamas that would halt fighting in the Gaza Strip, temporarily at least, and allow for the release of hostages from Hamas captivity. At the same time, it would bring freedom for some Palestinians held prisoner by Israel, and allow more aid, desperately needed, to reach Gazans.

But intractable holdups, over who and how many people should be released from each side and over a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, prevented a deal — and that was before the latest hostage killings.

Now the U.S. is continuing work on negotiations — but not involving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who President Biden said Monday was not doing enough to secure the hostages’ freedom.

Instead, the president said then, U.S. contacts are with “colleagues from Egypt and Qatar” — the two nations with direct contact with Hamas officials.

“We are working day and night to try to get an agreement over the line,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday. He would not comment on Netanyahu’s apparent rejection of elements of the deal. “We obviously believe this is an urgent matter.”

The news Tuesday evening that the Justice Department had announced terrorism charges against the leaders of Hamas will probably bring even more uncertainty in talks. The leaders are facing charges, including conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals, in connection with the militant group’s cross-border incursion into Israel Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people.

With the war entering its 12th month, Gaza is in the grip of a full-blown humanitarian disaster. At least 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the territory’s health officials, who do not differentiate between civilians and militants. Nearly all of the seaside enclave’s 2.3 million people are displaced, with entire cities bombed into mountains of rubble.

Early negotiating success — a U.S.-brokered accord last November that temporarily halted the fighting in Gaza and freed more than 100 hostages — is now a distant memory. Of the approximately 250 captives taken Oct. 7, Israel believes about 100 hostages remain in Gaza and at least a third are already dead.

The grieving families of the six slain hostages — who Israel says were shot in the head by their captors last week as troops operated nearby — voiced hopes that the violent deaths might prove the impetus for an accord that would free the remaining captives.

Jon Polin, father of Berkeley-born Hersh Goldberg-Polin, said Monday in a eulogy addressed to his 23-year-old son that over the months, the family had “sought the proverbial stone that we could turn over to save you.”

“Maybe, just maybe, your death is the stone” that could help bring the rest of the hostages home, he told the thousands of assembled mourners.

“I really hope that this is a turning point,” said Gil Dickmann, a cousin of Carmel Gat, another of the dead hostages, expressing similar hopes as he spoke to reporters hours before her funeral, also on Monday.

But amid a national spasm of grief, neither Netanyahu nor Hamas gave the slightest public hint that any movement was in the offing.

A big part of the problem, said Mara Rudman, a former special Middle East envoy for the State Department, is that neither Netanyahu nor Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar is motivated to halt the fighting.

“From the get-go, Netanyahu and Sinwar are the two in this equation whose interests do not align with getting to a cease-fire agreement,” she said in an interview.

Her analysis is chilling: Sinwar does not care about Palestinian deaths, since his goal is to stir international opprobrium against Israel and domestic turmoil within, and Netanyahu cares foremost about his political survival and avoiding prison, given criminal cases pending against him, which would be jeopardized if he agreed to a cease-fire deal that his far-right coalition partners object to.

At a Monday evening televised news conference, the Israeli leader signaled intransigence, declaring that Israel’s military control over a narrow strip of territory on the Gaza-Egypt border, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, was non-negotiable.

The nine-mile ribbon of land that Israel took control of in May, Netanyahu said, was “Hamas’ pipeline for oxygen and rearmament.”

“The axis of evil needs the Philadelphi Corridor,” he said. “We need to have it under our control.”

Hamas, for its part, sought to harshly dissuade Israel from any notion that hostages could be freed by military force, such as the Israeli raid that plucked four captives to safety in June from the crowded Nuseirat refugee camp. Palestinian officials said the Israeli raid killed scores of civilians, many of them women and children.

In a posting on the Telegram messaging app on Monday, the head of Hamas’ armed brigades appeared to suggest that an execution protocol had been put in place if Israeli troops were thought to be closing in.

“After the Nuseirat incident, new instructions were issued” to those guarding the captives, said the statement issued in the name of Abu Obeida, a nom de guerre.

Israeli officials interpreted the statement as a threat to kill hostages if Israeli troops were nearby, with the killings of the six as a gruesome illustration of that intent.

Netanyahu is under some of the strongest public pressure in months to strike a deal. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis flooded the streets of communities across Israel on Sunday, after the killings of the six were disclosed, and organizers have called for large demonstrations to continue nightly.

Protesting crowds chant slogans denouncing the prime minister as morally responsible for the hostage killings, and some wave signs depicting him with blood on his hands. But many among Netanyahu’s loyal base of supporters believe his commitment to an unrelenting military campaign is the best way to confront Hamas, ensure Israel’s safety and perhaps ultimately to free the hostages.

Illustrating the split over how to move forward, areas of the country where Netanyahu’s support is high largely declined to take part in a general strike called Monday by the country’s biggest labor federation.

While Netanyahu still has the fealty of most of his Cabinet, including the far-right figures who insist on continuing an all-out war, the country’s security establishment — notably his defense minister, Yoav Gallant — has publicly questioned his negotiating stance, accusing him in essence of searching for excuses to spurn a deal.

The prime minister’s latest show of defiance over the border strip also drew scorching editorial commentary.

“The Philadelphi route will wind up a highway paved with the hostages’ bodies,” analyst Zvi Bar’el wrote in the left-leaning Haaretz daily.

Netanyahu is well aware, though, that many Israelis derive a visceral satisfaction from the military hunting down the perpetrators of heinous acts in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Almost everyone here remembers the militants’ killing of a father of two named Gil Taasa, in the community of Netiv Haasara, one of many Israeli villages attacked that day. An assailant tossed a grenade into a shelter, killing him as he tried to shield his two young sons.

Widely viewed video showed the aftermath: the two bloodied boys cowering in shock in their living room as the attacker casually took a bottle of cola from the family’s refrigerator.

On Tuesday, the army said the man in the video, identified as Ahmed Fozi Wadia, a Hamas commander, had been killed in an airstrike in Gaza City along with seven other militants.

A military decision on when to carry out such strikes commonly comes only at the last moment even when they are planned well in advance, and normally depends on many factors. But however coincidental, the reported timing struck some as symbolic: Saturday, the day the hostages’ bodies were discovered.

Times staff writers King and Wilkinson reported from Tel Aviv and Washington, respectively.