Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s new vice-presidential candidate, plays as a huntin’ and fishin’ Midwestern dad.
In truth, he leans even harder left than Harris. As governor of Minnesota, he legalized recreational cannabis, pushed net-zero carbon emissions, made his state a sanctuary for teen transgender surgeries, and was a hard-core Covid authoritarian.
All predictable for a blue-state governor. But put aside Walz’s policies (for now) and consider what we have learned about his personality and history since he was picked.
Nothing fueled Walz’s rise in the last few weeks more than his canny description of JD Vance and Donald Trump as “weird.”
The media and Democrats lauded him as plainspoken, a straight shooter who calls it as he sees it. A typical New York Times encomium1 for him began:
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota presents as a regular dad from the Midwest. He hunts. He fishes. He ice fishes… He is so normal that his normality has become exceptional…
[He has] the energy of a sitcom dad, one who embodies the archetype so winningly that he walks onto the pilot set and immediately becomes a star.
But n comparing Walz to a breakout actor, the Times may have stumbled upon an unfortunate truth.
When it comes to his military service, arguably the key to his political biography, Walz has – at best – danced between the raindrops for a long time. He put in 24 years in a Minnesota Army National Guard battalion, rising steadily through the enlisted ranks.
But he quit in May 2005, just before his unit was deployed to Iraq.
Walz says he had decided to leave in order to run for Congress before the unit received any formal deployment orders. The key word there is “formal.” Walz was among the battalion’s most senior enlisted men, and it was no secret by the end of 2004 that the war in Iraq was not going well and United States would likely need to call up and send more units.
Hellbound and Down 