Tim Walz's Minnesota Vibes

The man who would be veep

Sep 13, 2024

The first thing a Minnesota political activist tells me when I ask about Tim Walz is this: when he gets mad, he tends to spit when he talks. The blue-state governor’s version of Minnesota Nice leans hard on the aggressive side of passivity, with an abiding predilection for taking offense at questions that fall into the category of what most politicians expect. His superior on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris, responds to such queries with awkward laughter in an attempt to buy time for an answer. But for Walz, the very act of questioning is felt as an insult to his character, leading to an unleashing of bitter invective founded in righteous anger that will absolutely lead to a follow-up call from his staff, as it did for multiple people over his years in Minnesota politics.

Walz has much to be mad at Republicans about these days — and his anger is only likely to increase in the coming weeks. Every vice-presidential pick gets targeted to some extent, particularly those who are relatively unknown nationally. But there’s a special place in the target zone for politicians from politically homogeneous states, where the lack of true opposition results in people climbing the ladder without having to navigate the challenges of a competitive environment. Getting questioned on your home turf is something many politicians can now thoroughly avoid given the diminished presence of local media — but on the national level, things can change rapidly, and new questions from people whose careers don’t depend on access to a governor raise the possibility that their carefully constructed narrative may have some holes in it.

What Walz satisfies in this moment is a deep and abiding desire of American progressives: they want an MSNBC daddy. It’s the closest thing to a political fetish, longing for someone who exudes some masculinity but not too much, a degree of strength but not too much, a willingness to fight for cause and country, but, again, not too much. For this task, Walz is perfect — a round Midwestern man clad in fresh new work clothes, in a governorship where the only question is how far left he wants to push.

Walz has emphasized the elements of his past that seem crafted for an audience on the left; they’ve been rolled out eagerly by the Harris campaign. He has claimed to be the only member of Congress who retired at the highest level of an enlisted Army officer, command sergeant major, after serving twenty-four years in the National Guard — invoking his service as proof of his authority to argue for gun control against the “weapons of war” he carried. The campaign declared Walz to be a wildly successful high school football coach, turning around a lackluster team to win multiple state championships while also spearheading a high-school gay-straight alliance. On the culture-war front, Walz repeatedly claimed that his family was only possible thanks to in vitro fertlization (IVF), a practice he and his fellow Democrats have falsely accused Republicans of wanting to ban.

Walz’s biographical points have significant political resonance in 2024, and they’re key to understanding why Kamala Harris picked him. He so impressed her campaign in performances with friendly interviewers, particularly a guest spot on the Obama-bro podcast Pod Save America where he called J.D. Vance “weird,” that Harris chose him over swing-state options like rising star Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, or Arizona astronaut-turned-senator Mark Kelly. Walz’s storyline won out, despite the fact that his bright blue state would go Harris anyway, and his being the farthest left of any of the VP candidates.

These stories fit the moment so perfectly that it’s a shame so many of them are false or exaggerated. Walz, repeatedly introduced at rallies and in interviews over the years as being a veteran of combat during the War on Terror, never saw combat or deployed to a war zone — instead, he left the National Guard to run for Congress when his unit was about to deploy to Iraq. His coaching job turns out to have been a volunteer defensive assistant position, which he left after just a few years. And as for IVF, the New York Times reported that the Walz family never used it — instead turning to the much less invasive and ethically less controversial use of artificial insemination.

In each case, Walz’s exaggerations suggest a deeper problem than the typical big fish stories told by incalculable numbers of politicians over the years. The many tall tales told by Joe Biden, for instance, occasionally have an intended political benefit — particularly the numerous résumé-enhancing claims made in his 1988 campaign, which ultimately led to an epic fall from grace. But what political gain is there in his many recitations of confronting a fellow by the name of “Corn Pop” at a Delaware pool? These fall into the category of elderly musings about a hazy, half-remembered past, more like Grampa Abe Simpson’s ramblings. If Walz were just claiming he used to wear an onion in his belt (it was the style at the time), his aggressive fictionizing would have a certain charm. Instead, it reads as a bizarre aspect to a newly nationalized political character, one who tells lies to gain advantage rather than just entertain the bored voter.

Yet given the early success of the choice, adding Walz to the ticket puts paid to the idea that what Americans want at this moment, more than anything, is authenticity. Who has time for that? Instead, American voters seem to crave a form of inauthenticity that reads as transparent and wholesome, perfect for the TikTok age. It’s ideally suited for politicians who are deeply ambitious and willing to do anything that is demanded at the moment. So it doesn’t matter that Kamala Harris had the most leftist record of any senator during her tenure, even more than Bernie Sanders, so long as her vibe is of a laughing, smiling, multiethnic version of America’s wine mom. She’s a vehicle, not a candidate — and Walz is just happy to be on the ride.

Of the two, though, it’s his record that seems more in keeping with ambitions for a second term. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” Walz told a caller on one of the campaign’s specially-targeted Zoom meetings. “Just do the damn work.” In this case, the work is going to be aggressively leftist, designed around a combination of Berkeley-San Francisco culture-war priorities and the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor mish-mash of big government spending and authoritarian busybodies.

Despite what should be a golden opportunity for Republicans, the Trump-Vance ticket has struggled to find its footing since the switch from Biden. Their operation was carefully constructed to prosecute the political case against the past four years of meandering policy on the economy, immigration and security issues, foreign and domestic. The curveball of facing off against a younger ticket with the full investment of the media and Hollywood at its back wasn’t something they were prepared to handle. And unless they unlock a new line of attack within the coming weeks, they may let one of the most unpopular administrations in American history snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It would be a devastating failure for Republicans, after all the things that have vindicated their critiques of Biden and Harris, to see the man who leads and defines their remade populist coalition flail his way into losing to a candidate who, as recently as this spring, was viewed as a major liability for her party.

Republicans are generally used to the imbalanced nature of the coverage they receive on the national stage, from journalists and commentators alike. But the bias is so heavy in this election it may prove impossible to overcome. The major networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — currently employ not even a single pro-Republican or pro-Trump commentator. The opinion pages of the Atlantic and the New York Times employ conservatives of the likes of David French, who eagerly endorsed Kamala Harris despite years of arguing against her radical record on abortion. As for campaign journalists, their complaints are more about lack of interview access than the ludicrous level to which Harris has run away from her entire policy record.

Together, Harris and Walz represent a new approach to a form of American politics where positions are meaningless, honesty is irrelevant and the truth of stories is all about feelings, not the facts. As such, they can be viewed as a natural leftward response to the arrogant bullshittery of the man they claim to hate the most. If Donald Trump can lie about how much money he has, how tall his buildings are, or whether a sack of money delivered to a porn star is accounted as a legal expense instead of a payoff, who can expect Tim Walz to be honest about IVF or Kamala Harris to be forthright about her toddler demand for “fweedom?” It’s a path toward even more unserious politics in an age of near-complete distrust of institutions. Who cares if the courts get packed? Who cares if the wall actually gets built or not? Who cares whether the stories are true? It’s only the vibes that count.

The Path Forward Post-Dobbs

Ryan T. Anderson.

In his last major address before his death, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus declared: “Until every human being created in the image and likeness of God is protected in law and cared for in life, we shall not weary, we shall not rest.” Protected in law and cared for in life remains the legal and cultural goal. But it will take time. Our entire constitutional, political, and social order was corrupted by fifty years of Roe. Conservatives are correct to point to the pedagogical function of law—the law is, as Aristotle noted, a teacher. The pedagogical result of a bad Supreme Court ruling, which was allowed to stand for so long, is the darkening of our national conscience. Generations of Americans were catechized in the beliefs that abortion is a right and that unborn babies have no rights—and that we have no duties to the unborn. Though Dobbs did important work to repair part of the damage to our constitutional order, it doesn’t—couldn’t—erase half a century of political and social corruption. And even for those of us who believe the unborn are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, constitutionally entitled to equal protection, widespread recognition of that fact is not going to happen quickly. We need to lay the groundwork for success in the long term.
A majority of Americans, though ambivalent about abortion, think that elective abortion should be legally permitted at least in the first trimester of pregnancy. As the results of state ballot measures over the past two years reveal, most Americans will vote for a radically permissive legal regime if they think the alternative is a complete prohibition of abortion. On this point, pro-lifers tend even to lose a portion of what should be our natural base: In Ohio, internal pro-life polling revealed that one-third of voters who said they go to church at least once a week voted for unlimited abortion in the recent state referendum.
For decades, public opinion had been relatively stable on abortion, and most Americans do support some legal limits on abortion. But since 2016, the public has taken a stark turn to abortion extremism on many counts. Consider recent Gallup polling: Not only do “a record-high 69% say abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy,” but a record-high 34 percent say abortion should be legal under any circumstance. Fifty-two percent say abortion is morally acceptable, ten points above what had been the average since 2001. The change in public opinion over the past decade is hard to come to grips with, but the pro-life movement needs to do just that.
Things get worse when you break the numbers down by party, sex, and age. In 2010, only 33 percent of self-identified Democrats thought abortion should be legal under any circumstance. Today that number has nearly doubled, as 60 percent of Democrats support abortion on demand. Among American women, support for unlimited abortion has grown from 30 percent to 40 percent. As my colleague Mary Hasson has repeatedly noted, women are key shapers of culture—their role as mothers, teachers, counselors, and nurses disproportionately influences the next generation. When 40 percent of women support abortion on demand, it is not just a statistic for today; it bodes poorly for the future. As a look at what’s to come, consider that 63 percent of fifty- to sixty-four-year-olds support first-trimester abortion, whereas a whopping 83 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds do. Kamala Harris’s abortion extremism is in step with the views of her base.
There are many reasons for this shift in public opinion. One is the rise of depression, disconnection, and anxiety in our youngest generations, and among young liberal women in particular. Young people are suffering and very fearful of unwanted pregnancies. Another likely reason is the person of Donald Trump. But above all, there is what Trump at first symbolized and then actualized: the overturning of Roe. Prior to Dobbs, most Americans did not have skin in the game, did not worry about being denied an abortion should the day come when they “need” one. It was easier to affirm the dignity of the child in the womb when the affirmation was abstract and did not imply a threat to anyone’s “choice.” Now all of us, including pro-lifers, have to count the potential cost.

The Left’s Assault on Free Speech

Jonathan Turley.

The attacks on the court are part of a growing counterconstitutional movement that began in higher education and seems recently to have reached a critical mass in the media and politics. The past few months have seen an explosion of books and articles laying out a new vision of “democracy” unconstrained by constitutional limits on majority power.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. In a 2021 Los Angeles Times op-ed, he described conservative justices as “partisan hacks.”
In the New York Times, book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.” She writes: “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” She frets that by limiting the power of the majority, the Constitution “can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.”
In a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Others have railed against individual rights. In my new book on free speech, I discuss this movement against what many professors deride as “rights talk.” Barbara McQuade of the University of Michigan Law School has called free speech America’s “Achilles’ heel.” In another Times op-ed, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, asserts that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” George Washington University Law’s Mary Ann Franks complains that the First Amendment (and also the Second) is too “aggressively individualistic” and endangers “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare.”
Mainstream Democrats are listening to radical voices. “How much does the current structure benefit us?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said in 2021, explaining her support for a court-packing bill. “I don’t think it does.” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said at the Democratic National Committee’s “LGBTQ+ Kickoff” that “we’ve got to reimagine” democracy “in a way that is more revolutionary than . . . that little piece of paper.” Both AOC and Ms. Robinson later spoke to the convention itself.
The Nation’s Elie Mystal calls the Constitution “trash” and urges the abolition of the U.S. Senate. Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law School complains that Americans are “slaves” to the Constitution.
Without countermajoritarian protections and institutions, politics would be reduced to raw power. That’s what some have in mind. In an October 2020 interview, Harvard law professor Michael Klarman laid out a plan for Democrats should they win the White House and both congressional chambers. They would enact “democracy-entrenching legislation,” which would ensure that “the Republican Party will never win another election” unless it moved to the left. The problem: “The Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described, and that’s something the Democrats need to fix.”