Two things have struck me about the recent selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket.
The first was the guy’s resume before politics – high school social studies teacher and football coach, National Guard sergeant major, duck hunter, state college graduate. Walz won a Minnesota congressional delegation cooking contest with his hot dish recipe. If Walz is what he seems to be – and if he’s faking it he’s doing a really great job – he is a remarkably normal American, something increasingly rare in our politics.
[The original version of this column was filed before the Trump campaign attacked Walz’s military record. It’s hard to believe the attacks, or better yet smears – managed by the same guy who “Swift boated” Senator John Kerry in 2004 – will stick to Walz who, after all, spent 24 years in the Guard.]
The second was the obvious joy he brings to politics. Enough to remind you of Hubert Humphrey, another Minnesota vice president. Walz smiles a lot. He laughs. He seems to enjoy the personal interactions of retail politics. He’s the kind of politician who can “work the room,” engaging with total strangers and enjoy it. This, too, has become extremely rare.
I worked for a politician with the same characteristics. His name was Cecil Andrus, and I have always thought he was the most comfortable person in his own skin that I have ever known. Tim Walz reminds me of Cece Andrus, a politician who spent a career overachieving as a Democrat in a very conservative state.
Andrus, the four-term Idaho governor and secretary of the interior, never met a stranger. He loved, absolutely loved, the small personal interactions that can make or break a retail politician. If Andrus walked into a room and spotted a political adversary, someone he had a political difference with, he made a beeline for that person. He’d extend a hand and crack a joke, totally disarming the other person. It was a skill most of us lack, engaging with someone we disagree with.
People still tell me stories about the first time they met Andrus. They remember the details, and while he had a legendary ability to recall names and faces he wasn’t perfect, but most everyone thinks he was.
He could make a joke at his own expense. When was the last time you heard that from our national real estate developer and serial sexual abuser? Or literally anyone in national politics, come to think of it?
Andrus freely appropriated an old joke attributed to the great Arizona Congressman Mo Udall who related walking into an Iowa barber shop in 1976 while campaigning for president. “Good morning, I’m Mo Udall and I’m running for president,” Mo would say. And he would then relate the barber’s reaction: “I know, we were just laughing about that this morning.”
Who doesn’t like a guy who can tell that kind of joke on himself?
After riding a horse in the Eastern Idaho Fair parade, a supporter said to Andrus: “Boy, you got a warm reception.” His replay, “Yup, and some were waving all five fingers.”
The Republican ticket is populated by two angry sourpusses. Donald Trump is a raging insult machine. A man selling darkness. He’s running for one reason: to stay out of jail. His running mate is a shape shifting 40-year-old who reinforces the negative. America is going to hell. Dark skinned people are taking your jobs. Meanness is a virtue. Angry cat ladies are ruining the country.
There are two kinds of political campaigns: campaigns built on anger, grievance and destroying the opponent and campaigns centered on hope and the future.
I suspect Kamala Harris chose the former high school teacher from Nebraska because he doesn’t display any grievance. Like Cece Andrus he isn’t a hater.
J.D. Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, went to Yale, made a bundle working as a venture capitalist in California and said he despised Trump before he didn’t. Tim Walz went to Chadron State College, taught school in Alliance, Nebraska – I know that place and it is conservative and rural – and later coached a high school football team to the Minnesota state championship.
What do those who have observed him up close say about Vance? “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told journalist McKay Coppins, who pegs Vance an opportunistic phony. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”
As Aaron Sanderford wrote in the Nebraska Examiner, “Walz coached linebackers and signaled the defense at Alliance High School under coach Jeff Tomlin.”
“Tomlin said he remembers Walz as an amazing coach and social studies teacher. He called Walz ‘an ordinary guy with the extraordinary ability to have a vision for who he is and who he wants to be.’
“He was an exceptional teacher, one of the best I’ve been around,” Tomlin said.
The Republican campaign has only two gears: negative and nasty. It’s not morning in America, it’s a vision of a shithole country, populated by vile people who, as Trump said this week, “want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”
That’s preposterous Trumpian BS, a convicted felon and Putin apologist telling the rest of us about law and order. The Republican campaign will continue to disintegrate day-by-day with Trump, if it is possible, growing more and more unhinged.
One reason Walz will be so effective over the next three months is that, again like Andrus, he’s both decent and tough. He can make a joke, as he did while trolling fellow Governor Kristi Noem, she of South Dakota puppy killing fame, and never mention the subject of the jab. Walz posted a photo of his own dog taking a treat and saying “show me you didn’t shoot your dog and dump it in a gravel pit. I’ll go first.” Noem wasn’t mentioned. Everyone knew. Noem, of course, wanted to be Trump’s vice president and, as if to compensate for not making it, immediately labeled Walz “radical.”
Another inviolate rule: Politics is a matter of addition. Tim Walz is additive to the Democratic ticket. We’ll be talking about the high school course he developed on the Holocaust, while Vance is still answering questions about calling Trump “America’s Hitler.”
Hope is additive. Grievance is exhausting. We’ll see soon enough if America wants a future of hope or something much darker.
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Additional Reading:
A couple of other items of note …
Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think we should ban books – period. But Utah is going full speed ahead. Aren’t conservatives always demanding parental control. Let parents decide what their kids can read
“Books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas are among 13 titles that the state of Utah has ordered to be removed from all public school classrooms and libraries.”
What a travesty. Read the full story.
Steve Symms, senator who was voice of conservative ire, dies at 86
I knew the former Idaho senator pretty well, covered some of his campaigns and moderated the debates Symms had with Senator Frank Church in 1980. He was an Idaho original, and an early adopter of the kind of ruthlessly negative campaigns that now define politics at every level.
The first graph of his obit in the Washington Post is really rather stunning.
“Steve Symms, a former Republican lawmaker from Idaho who made staunch conservative views his political brand and rattled the 1988 presidential campaign by falsely claiming that the wife of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis once burned an American flag, died Aug. 8 at his home in Leesburg, Va. He was 86.”
More soon. Thanks for reading. All the best.