“We don’t have time to sit around and think about why, over the last few years, certain things may have happened or may not have happened,” Ian Sams, who was previously an attack dog for Biden, told CNN on Thursday morning. “We’ve got to go win an election.”

Sams had been laying out Harris’s plans and contrasting them with those of former President Donald Trump, her Republican opponent. He said more than once what Harris was proposing was “new” and “really different.”

“It’s really different. OK,” CNN’s Kasie Hunt pressed him at one point. “Can you — wait, can you tell me what is really different? I got the capital gains rate, but what else on the list makes it really different from what was going on the past few years?”

Hunt tried again. “But she’s been part of the Biden administration,” she said of Harris. “I mean she has been part of the Democratic — Democrats have been in control of the country for the last three going on four years, and you are still seeing this [economic anxiety] in the polling.”

In fact, Democrats have held the White House for 12 of the last 16 years. They have controlled at least one house of Congress for half of Trump’s term and all of Biden’s.

“I mean, these working-class voters are telling us right now that more of them are with Donald Trump than Kamala Harris,” Hunt continued. “Why — what is it about what you guys have been doing for the last three-plus years that explains that?”

“And so, you know, I understand the pundit class wants to sit around and maybe have these conversations,” Sams shot back. “But at the end of the day, this is a campaign. And we’re running to win. And she’s running to win.”

There is no time to dwell on the Biden-Harris record, he said, “We’ve got 60 days until the election.”

The quote is reminiscent of Mitt Romney’s comment during the 2012 presidential campaign about accidentally hiring a worker with falsified documents: “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake. I can’t have illegals.”

And of course, Harris’s go-to line about what can be, unburdened by what has been.

Before Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) during their first sitdown media interview — on CNN, as it happened — there were plenty of allies saying their focus should be on winning, not answering questions. 

Politico’s Jonathan Martin dismissed “the righty fixation” with Harris’s “lack of access” as “cover” for conservatives’ “actual frustration”: They are “stuck w[ith] a candidate incapable of driving a message after the other guys yanked off the band-aid and dumped their guy who couldn’t drive a message.”

“I think, it’s all about winning the f***ing election,” filmmaker Quentin Tarantino told Bill Maher. “The easiest path to winning the election is … look, you can talk about maybe she should have had more guts about this or that or the other, but we’re the f***ing president. And Trump’s not the president, and we’re the f***ing president, and now it’s going to be about this. This is about f***ing winning.”

Campaigns are of course about winning. Elections are about the future more than the past. But just as Trump is going to be judged by his first term as president and his near decade in national politics, Harris has to answer for her record and explain her once and future policy positions.

You can paraphrase Biden as saying, “You can’t love your democracy only when you win.” Or you can directly quote the legendary UCLA football coach Henry Russell Sanders: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”