No, Minnesota’s Tim Walz did not govern as a ‘moderate,’ and J. D. Vance is not ‘as far right’ as they come.
The early spin on Kamala Harris selecting Minnesota governor Tim Walz is that he’s a terrific pick because Walz gives off the right “vibe.” Mike Murphy assures us that Walz has a “moderate vibe,” distinct from his “labor liberal record. Second media look, if honest, will note this is most progressive D ticket since Dukakis.” Jonathan Martin reports that Harris had a better “vibe” with Walz than with Shapiro.
When people say Walz has a “moderate vibe,” they mean he’s a heavyset, bald, glasses-and-flannel-wearing Midwesterner who looks like he could be a guy behind the counter at a hardware store, recommending the Phillips-head machine screw over the flathead machine screw.
The good “vibes” on Walz require averting your eyes from his record as governor, one embarrassing and egregious large-scale scandal of waste, fraud, and mismanagement after another.
Perceiving a moderate “vibe” requires not looking at Walz’s actual positions, which includes his own self-described “abject failure” on responding to the George Floyd riots, his support of making Minnesota a “sanctuary state” that doesn’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities, driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, and a hotline number established during the Covid pandemic so Minnesotans could report their neighbors violating social-distancing guidelines. Progressive columnists are gushing that Walz’s governance has been “as liberal as possible” in his state.
In terms of how he has governed his state, Walz is not a moderate at all. But remember, he gives off moderate vibes!
Judging politicians based on “vibes” is a polite way of saying, “I’m too lazy and incurious to look at their actual records and actions.”
A friend recently related a story of a person in a newsroom declaring, “JD Vance is about as far right as you can possibly pick.” This suggests someone who pays attention to the cat-lady statements and little else.
Vance is the Republican senator who told Ross Douthat, “I’m not philosophically against raising taxes on anybody” and contends that “tariffs can apply upward pricing pressure on various things — though I think it’s massively overstated — but when you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects.”
He’s open to raising the minimum wage to $20. He walked a United Auto Workers picket line. He’s a fan of Biden’s head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan. In July 2023, Politico called Vance and Elizabeth Warren “the new power couple taking on Wall Street.”
Vance famously quipped during a February 2022 appearance on Stephen K. Bannon’s War Room podcast, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” He later backtracked, but it’s fair to wonder how much Vance means it.
On Taiwan, Vance told Douthat: “Our policy effectively is one of strategic ambiguity. I think that we should make it as hard as possible for China to take Taiwan in the first place, and the honest answer is we’ll figure out what we do if they attack.”
Does any of that sound “about as far right as you can possibly pick”?
But Vance looks and sounds and “feels” like a really right-wing guy, and certain people, apparently including those who cover politics for a living, draw conclusions about people based on their “vibe.”
A lot of people learn the hard way that you should not judge people by what they say but based on what they do. It’s just a shame that so many people in the world of politics insist on judging a book by its cover.