The Anti-Weird Choice: Why Harris Picked Walz
White House/Getty
By Lisa Van Dusen
August 6, 2024
In an American presidential campaign that has already been unprecedented as a race in which the Republican candidate is a twice-impeached convicted felon and failed coup plotter and the Democratic candidate and failed-coup target, the incumbent president, was replaced at the 9th hour, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is a breath of ordinary air.
When Vice President Kamala Harris’s own vice-presidential pick was leaked Tuesday morning, Canadians spiked Goggle trends to 100% for Tim Walz searches. This sudden level of Canadian curiosity about Walz — a border-state governor whose apparent lack of bilateral belligerence has kept him off our collective national radar — replicated a similar, presumably more urgent, level of need-to-know south of the border.
For the dozen of you who haven’t Googled him, Walz is a 60-year-old Nebraska-born former high school teacher, football coach and six-term Minnesota congressman (in what had been a GOP district) who served 24 years in the National Guard. He vaulted to national prominence in July as the surrogate who birthed the anti-Trump/J.D. Vance attack line “These guys are just weird.”
“In an instant, a meme was born,” per Forbes on Tuesday. “Walz shared a clip from the Morning Joe interview on X … and it has generated more than 5 million views.”
To an American electorate exhausted by more than a decade of Donald Trump’s daily assaults on truth, delinquent relationship to Constitutional convention and the rule of law, and flamboyant gift-that-keeps-on-giving value to the global war on democracy, the instantly axiomatic observation that “It’s the weirdness, stupid” — not in so many words, since Walz is also an advocate for grace and joy in politics — was, apparently, the naked-emperor exposition drop that Americans didn’t know they were longing for.
Walz was not chosen as Harris’s running mate because of a five-word quote. He is the twice-elected governor of a “blue wall”-adjacent Midwestern state, combines a record of implementing solutions known in the US as “progressive policies” or just “policies” in Canada — enshrining the right to abortion in state law, legalizing marijuana, establishing paid medical and family leave, and expanding background checks for gun purchases.
‘It’s the weirdness, stupid’ — not in so many words, since Walz is an advocate for grace and joy in politics — was, apparently, the naked-emperor exposition drop that Americans didn’t know they were longing for.’
A hunter and gun owner, Walz, who had been supported as a congressman by the National Rifle Association, renounced the group after the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., earning him an “F” NRA rating. He then campaigned on the downgrade during his successful gubernatorial race.
The chemistry question was also, reportedly, decisive. And presidential-vice presidential chemistry is a political intangible that doesn’t always line up with Match.com algorithms. Harris sources have said that Walz aced the “chemistry test”.
Above all, Walz completes a picture of America on the Democratic ticket that much of the country can relate to — geographically, demographically, culturally and temperamentally. That combination contrasts sharply with the relentless, well, weirdness of Donald Trump — no need to cue that montage — and a GOP running mate in Vance who, so far, has only doubled down on Trump’s unrelatability.
In a country whose rural and suburban middle and South are obsessed with high-school football the way hockey is a way of life in small towns across Canada, Walz’s status as a coach who took a losing team to the state championship beats Vance’s as a bestselling author whose bestseller blamed poor and working-class Appalachians for the ravages of an opioid epidemic enabled by pharmaceutical, regulatory and medical corruption.
“He’s a Norman Rockwell painting sprung to life,” former Obama advisor David Axelrod said of Walz on CNN Tuesday.
In the coming weeks, interests who’d prefer that Harris and the Democrats not prevail in November — including but not limited to Trump, Vance, GOP surrogates, Fox News, Hulk Hogan and Russian misinformation bots — will try to transform that Norman Rockwell painting into something more akin to a Hieronymus Bosch or an Edvard Munch.
But they would have done that with any VP pick.
Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.