The Moment I Fell for Tim Walz

Betting on someone who bets on people

Dear Friends,

As you probably know by now, Vice President Kamala Harris officially picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate yesterday.

For those unfamiliar with Walz’s game before now, (i.e. anyone with a fulfilling social life), he’s a classic Midwestern varietal of a liberal dad. Funny, plainspoken, cheerful. Here, for example, is a life-affirming video of him telling Minnesotans to go vote while also explaining how to replace a faulty headlight harness.

Due to X’s war with Substack, you have to click on the image to get to the video. Silly, I know.

Insomuch as anyone should fall for a politician, I wanted to write about why I appreciate Walz as a partner to Kamala Harris in this election cycle. A veteran, a former social studies teacher in a rural district, and a former football coach – his team once won the state championship, which is no small feat in Minnesota – Walz stands out as an aw-shucks throwback in a party that has lately failed to mint them on the national level.

During the vetting process, there was already a certain cynicism about who Harris would pick as VP, specifically that it would be an inoffensive white guy, a figure likely laden with the same kind of stolid unsexiness that has bedeviled past Democratic tickets. But I’d argue that Walz is actually not such a safe pick. Here’s one capsule of Walz’s recent legislative achievements in Minnesota:

Mr. Walz has worked with his state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature to enact an ambitious agenda of liberal policies: free college tuition for low-income students, free meals for schoolchildren, legal recreational marijuana and protections for transgender people.

Walz also recently led successful campaigns in Minnesota to codify paid leave for workers and abortion rights and universal background checks for guns. A hunter, Walz once basked in the approbation of the NRA, but changed his position after the Parkland school shooting in 2018. In the past few years, he has achieved a wishlist of ambitious Democratic priorities that seem to be playing well, even in places where Trump and Trumpism have also done well.

All of this makes Walz a potential boon to the Harris campaign, that is, if voters are able to get behind what investments in communities and families and public safety can do to help people. These exact same attributes are also what make Walz a potential liability, that is, if Republicans successfully cast him a daffy leftist boogeyman, which they are already trying to do. (Weirdly, J.D. Vance labeled Walz as a “San Francisco-style liberal” yesterday afternoon.)

The Crunchwrap Swoon

Ultimately, the selection of Walz was the unlikely result of an intraparty battle that we will almost certainly hear about again, especially if things ultimately fail to break for Democrats in November. Bret Stephens, the conservative Times columnist, was one of many to make the argument that the election will fall neatly in the hands of a coalition of moderates, independents, and Never Trump voters and therefore, a more cautious and centrist option (like PA Governor Josh Shapiro) would make for a better choice.¹

I’ll admit I found parts of this argument compelling, but Walz turned me around pretty quickly as it became clear that he was being given a real look. In an interview with Ezra Klein last week, which was part of his public audition for the VP slot, Walz managed to pinpoint something that has eluded most reasonable folks who oppose the chaos and anger that the Trump-Vance ticket is trying to sow: The need to spell out a vision for America that isn’t about the threats that a Trump presidency poses to democracy. To be real, that message doesn’t really register if you already believe the system is broken or crooked or not working anymore.

Walz is a terrific messenger for a cold-water reckoning. Over the past few weeks, he has been credited with deploying the word “weird” to defang the righteous swagger of the Trump-Vance culture wars; weird has since become the Democrat watchword. And in the Klein interview, the moment I fell for Walz came when he articulated how to counter Trump’s anti-elitist anger that plays so well and has been so difficult to counter in places where Democrats need to win.

Here’s Klein’s preamble: [O]ne of the most dangerous emotions that Democrats sometimes let slip — the negative side of, I think, the liberal personality — can be a kind of contempt, a kind of smugness. This is why Hillary Clinton’s comment on deplorables was so damaging. How do you police that boundary?

And here’s how Walz replied:

This is where I take offense to JD Vance and “Hillbilly Elegy.” Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they’re not weird. I know they’re not Donald Trump.

The thing is, we have to get them away from what he’s trying to sell because that’s not who they are. Just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he’s a good boy. That’s what I do. And that’s what those rallygoers do. That is exactly who they are, and they’re going through the same things all of our families are.

He’s captured some of this. And fear is scary. I mean, the world is changing. We’re seeing, you know, conflict in the Middle East. We saw a global pandemic, which he did nothing to fix but seized upon.

And I think it’s kind of breaking that spell again of saying, “Look, he’s not offering you anything.” And then we dang sure better be ready to offer something.

I mean, first of all, the guy is funny. And not in a way that’s too clever for its own good. But also, he’s right (I think) about how to make a good-faith argument to the anguished in the year 2024 about what real progress can look like when leaders aren’t afraid to seize a moment.

Plenty of people, Kamala Harris included, are already doing this. Walz may not bring a clear, detectable, consultant-tested electoral benefit to the ticket in the way that Shapiro or Kelly might have, but he seems to be doing something else. Something a bit more imaginative and ambitious and fun. I’m a fan.

1. Not that anyone cares, but I was nervous about basically anyone but NC Governor Roy Cooper (who removed himself from VP contention in the early stages of the process) or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.