In accepting the Democratic vice-presidential nomination, Minnesota governor Tim Walz tried to present himself as a sort of Mister Rogers type whom everybody should want as their neighbor. But in the weeks ahead, that image will have to contend against a record that includes a history of fabrication and radicalism.
In his speech, Walz tried to portray Democrats as a laissez-faire party. He claimed that in Minnesota, “We respect our neighbors, and the personal choices they make, and even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: ‘Mind your own damn business!’”
But as governor, he imposed among the most draconian Covid restrictions in the nation and even set up a hotline for residents to rat out neighbors who weren’t following his social-distancing rules.
In Walz’s twisted moral universe, “Mind your own damn business!” isn’t actually about letting neighbors make their own choices, it is a justification for the unfettered ability to kill unborn babies.
In another reframing of freedom, Walz said, “I believe in the Second Amendment, but I also believe our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.”
It is a universal truth that whenever a politician says he believes in the Second Amendment and then adds a “but,” he doesn’t actually believe in the Second Amendment.
During her first run for president, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris called for the confiscation of AR-15-style guns, a position that she has yet to publicly disavow (despite what campaign officials tell reporters). At a minimum, Harris and Walz have both called for banning them.
Walz also claimed that Democrats support Americans’ ability to make their own health-care decisions. Meanwhile, he and Harris both support expanding Obamacare, which mandated that every American had to purchase government-designed health-insurance policies and outlawed policies that millions had used. In her first campaign, Harris proposed kicking 180 million people off of their private insurance.
Meanwhile, Walz lied about the positions of his opponents. He falsely claimed that there was a Project 2025 plan to “gut” Social Security and Medicare and ban abortion nationwide “with or without Congress” and that Donald Trump supported it — and implied that Trump and J. D. Vance were a threat to IVF. Though we wish Trump were actually serious about reining in entitlement programs, in reality Trump has disavowed Project 2025 (which, again, doesn’t call for Social Security cuts anyway), and the Republican platform that he had direct control over explicitly says that abortion should be left to the states, that IVF access should be supported, and that Medicare and Social Security shouldn’t be cut.
These distortions shouldn’t be a surprise. Over the course of decades, Walz has played fast and loose with the facts for his political benefit. He has enabled misrepresentations of his career in the Minnesota National Guard to flourish. In the run-up to the convention, in attacking Vance with the false claim that he wanted to ban IVF, Walz advanced another lie — that his own children were conceived through the procedure. In reality, his wife used another fertility treatment that does not involve the creation or destruction of embryos outside of the womb. (He was more careful in his phrasing during his convention speech.) These lies are on top of a history of untruthful statements during his career, including his preposterous claims that 80 percent of rioters after the George Floyd killing came from out of state and that, despite protracted school closures during Covid, “over 80 percent of our students missed less than ten days of in-class learning.”
Though Walz tried to tout tax cuts in his convention speech, he has been a fiscally reckless governor, squandering surpluses on liberal wish-list items and proposing tax increases on individuals, businesses, capital gains, dividends, and gas, as well as various fees.
Harris and Walz have had a remarkable run for several weeks, boosted by a party that was desperate to replace a flailing President Biden and a cooperative press corps. But as the fall approaches, it will become much harder to hide the truth from voters.