On the menu today: I know everyone in the mainstream media is going to tell you that a star was born on the stage of the United Center last night, and that Tim Walz is the perfect amalgamation of coach Norman Dale from Hoosiers, Red Green, and almost any character played by Wilford Brimley. That speech last night was designed and carefully calibrated to remind voters from Altoona, Pa., to Henderson, Nev., of every heavyset, balding, corny-joke-telling dad they’ve ever met. The only problem is that we’re not casting a sitcom star, we’re electing a vice president, and the portrayal of Walz’s record last night was airbrushed in a wind tunnel. Read on to learn about what this man has done as governor, which ought to be front and center when contemplating whether he should be moving into the Naval Observatory next January.
Finally, the Border Czar Wants to Build Up a Walz
Chicago — Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz began his convention address on an oddly discordant, peevish note: “I grew up in the small town of Butte, Neb., population 400. I had 24 kids in my high-school class and none of ’em went to Yale.”
This wasn’t an accident; a couple of days ago, Walz sneered, “We don’t need a Yale-educated philosophy major backed by billionaire venture capitalists to tell us who we are.”
First, J. D. Vance majored in philosophy at THE Ohio State University*, and he studied law at Yale Law School.
Second, Democrats, don’t even try to pretend like you now think there’s something wrong with Yale graduates. Last night, the convention stage featured three Yale graduates in former president Bill Clinton, New Jersey senator Cory Booker, and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar. Democrats, you sure as heck don’t have any problem with Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, Hillary Clinton, Delaware senator Chris Coons, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont, former Democratic nominee John Kerry, national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, or Treasury secretary Janet Yellen. Democrats sneering at Yale University is like flowers sneering at soil. It’s where they start to grow.
Third, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee is scoffing at philosophy majors? One of the most left-wing majors out there? By the way, Walz’s bachelor degree from Chadron State College was in “Social Science Education.”
Walz continued, “I represented my neighbors in Congress for twelve years and I learned an awful lot. I learned how to work across the aisle on issues like growing rural economies and taking care of our veterans. And I learned how to compromise without compromising my values.”
Walz didn’t mention why he left Congress, which is that his district was getting more heavily Republican and he just barely hung on by his fingernails in 2016, winning by about one percentage point. Running for governor statewide in deep-blue Minnesota was actually an easier prospect than running for reelection in the purple-to-red district. As he ran for governor, Walz was the second-most absent member of the House of Representatives in 2017 and 2018, missing nearly a third of all votes.
But Walz the representative and Walz the governor turned out to be two different guys. You could make the argument that in the U.S. House, Walz was fairly centrist by the standard of Democrats of that era — he earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, voted to build the Keystone Pipeline, and voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over Fast and Furious.
But as governor, he’s been about as far left as Minnesota would allow — on education, on abortion, on immigration and law enforcement, on the First Amendment and free speech, and on spending. And as I like to remind people, his time as governor has seen some of the worst scandals in waste, fraud, and abuse in the entire country.
As the Washington Post’s James Hohmann observes, “In 2022, while cruising to a second term as governor, he lost his former district — which stretches along the Iowa border from South Dakota to Wisconsin — by 8 points.” Hohmann contends that Harris needs the more centrist Walz who represented that district, not the more progressive governor who won by running up his vote tally in the Twin Cities.
NBC’s Steve Kornacki crunched the numbers and concluded, “In his ’22 campaign, Walz didn’t restore that old balance. His coalition, instead, looked just like what has become the standard post-Obama coalition for Democrats. He rolled up massive margins in metro areas and took a beating practically everywhere else.”
It is fair to doubt that Tim Walz could win a congressional race in Minnesota’s First District today.
Returning to Walz’s speech, he boasted, “We invested in fighting crime.”
This is the governor who was responsible for the state government’s response to the George Floyd riots in late May 2020. Just listen to this account of the chaos in those Minneapolis streets:
Last night I got a call from a friend and a dedicated public servant. Senator [Patricia] Torres Ray called, in her district and it was on fire. And there weren’t any police there. There weren’t any firefighters. There was no social control, and her constituents were locked in their house, wondering what they were going to do. That is an abject failure that cannot happen. We must restore that order.
That stinging assessment of “abject failure” comes from . . . Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
Months later, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey described trying to get Walz to authorize the deployment of the National Guard as his city burned:
In an interview Monday, Frey said that Walz hesitated to send in the National Guard to quell the growing violence and then blamed him for allowing the city to burn.
“Through an extremely difficult situation, I told the truth,” Frey said Monday. “I relayed information as best I could to state partners. And we did what was demanded for the sake of our city.”
Texts and e-mails obtained from Minneapolis by the Star Tribune through public records requests show the city was trying to give Walz and the state Department of Public Safety what they said they needed to move forward. . . .
Frey said he immediately telephoned Walz, at 6:29 p.m., relayed information, and asked him to send in the National Guard. “We expressed the seriousness of the situation. The urgency was clear,” Frey said.
“He did not say yes,” Frey said of Walz. “He said he would consider it.”
The protests started on the night of Tuesday, May 26; Walz didn’t activate the National Guard until midafternoon on Thursday, May 28.
And last night, Walz stood up on stage in Chicago and boasted about how great a crimefighter he is.
Before Kamala Harris selected Walz to be her running mate on August 6, few Americans outside of Minnesota knew much about him. Before his selection, one survey found Walz viewed positively by 17 percent of U.S. adults and unfavorably by 12 percent, with 71 percent either never having heard of Walz or being unsure how to rate him.
And 152 days from now, Tim Walz may be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Walz is more popular now, with 36 percent of respondents feeling favorably and 25 percent feeling unfavorably about him. This is a testament to what two weeks of overwhelmingly positive coverage can do for a little-known governor. Give Walz a week of J. D. Vance’s coverage, and he’d crumple to the ground like, oh, just about any Minnesota Vikings quarterback in recent years.
No doubt, the childless-cat-lady-denouncing Vance creates a lot of his own worst problems. But you notice the Ohio senator is out there taking questions from reporters and doing the Sunday shows. He doesn’t have to be protected in bubble wrap like your grandmother’s vase during a move.
There is, of course, the not-so-minor wrinkle that Walz has lied about a lot. Axios generously calls Walz a “gaffe factory,” except the words “lie” and “gaffe” are not synonyms.
Walz has, at minimum, comfortably nodded as other people have described him as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He said he carried weapons of war “in war,” which he’s now said was a mistake. He’s misstated his rank at retirement many times.
He sent out a fundraising letter that claimed, “My wife and I used I.V.F. (In Vitro Fertilization) to start a family.” The Walzs used IUI (intrauterine insemination), a different procedure that does not involve discarding fertilized embryos.
His congressional campaign offered a nonsense tale downplaying the severity of his DUI.
He also has the habit of saying what he thinks ought to be true, not knowing what actually is true. He asserted that 80 percent of those arrested during the George Floyd riots were from outside the state. The truth was the opposite:
St. Paul police logs show two-thirds of those arrested for looting and property destruction connected to the protests are from Minnesota. And the Minneapolis logs show 93 of the 109 people arrested in the city between Thursday night and Saturday morning reside in-state.
He downplayed the consequences of student learning loss during the pandemic, arguing, “These kids learned resilience, these kids learned compassion for one another, these kids learned problem-solving.” But the state’s test scores since the pandemic tell a different story:
The percentage of Minnesota fourth graders not proficient in reading has increased from 62 percent in 2019 to 68 percent in 2022. Eighth-graders not proficient in math increased from 56 percent to 68 percent. Nearly a third of all Minnesota students were chronically absent — meaning they missed 10 percent or more of school days — during the 2021-2022 school year.”
Democrats really want to believe that Tim Walz is a gruff, blunt truth-teller because of his folksy persona. In reality, he’s something of a BS artist.
*If you don’t say the “THE,” Brutus appears from behind a tree and throws buckeyes at you.
Harris Campaign Manager: Americans Don’t Really Know Her
Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillion, speaking at the CNN-POLITICO Grill Wednesday: “We all know who the vice president is, but the American people don’t really know her that well, and they don’t know her story.”
How is that possible? She started running for president in early 2019 and has been vice president for three and a half years. How can you be an elderly man’s heartbeat away from the presidency for nearly four years and still be a cypher?
The Democrats Revert to Factory Settings on the Pharmaceutical Industry
Last night, Tim Walz pledged, “If you’re getting squeezed by the price of your prescription drugs, Kamala Harris is gonna take on Big Pharma.”
Hey, remember less than four years ago, when just about every major Democratic official insisted you absolutely had to take a vaccine from Pfizer or Moderna, or else you would lose your job? Tim Walz said you needed an updated vaccination card or you had to get tested once a week or you could no longer work for the state government.
Big Pharma was the big hero then — and that was the summer of 2021! Pharmaceutical companies ended the Covid pandemic, and here we are, three years later, and Democrats are kicking them around as the villains again.
ADDENDUM: Take heart, Ukrainians. Every Russian penetration gets pushed back eventually. If this is the way the Russians treat their livestock, I’m starting to understand why they had so many years where they missed their beef and dairy quotas.