Harris-Walz: That's the ticket!

Kamala Harris, who was last night officially named the Democratic nominee for president, announced the pick for her vice presidential running mate this morning, Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, who won out over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.  Both would have been excellent candidates.  Harris chose the Midwesterner with the folksy manner because of his patented way of getting under the skin of Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, describing the two, and the MAGA movement in general as “weird,” a line of attack that quickly entered the national political lexicon. 

Walz is an unabashed liberal, proudly declaring himself as such in an interview on CNN in July: “What a monster! Kids are eating, eating and having full bellies so they can go learn and women are making their own health care decisions,” Walz bragged sarcastically in the interview. “So, if that's where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”

Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard at age 17 and attended Chadron State College in Nebraska on the GI Bill.  Walz and his wife, Glenn Whipple, were both teachers when they met in Nebraska.  In 1996, they moved to Minnesota to take high school teaching jobs in Mankato, where Walz also coached the football team.  Walz gained attention in Minnesota in the 1990’s when he sponsored the first gay-straight alliance at his high school, saying at the time that he thought it important that the group was sponsored by “the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.”

Walz decided to enter politics after taking a group of his high school students to a rally for George W. Bush in 2004.  The students were denied entry to the rally because several of them were wearing buttons supporting Bush’s opponent, John Kerry, and were “deemed a threat by a security guard,” Walz later recalled in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio. “It was a combination of being a little bit frustrated and a kind of epiphany moment of how it felt for people to be looked right through.”

In 2006, Walz upset a Republican incumbent in a race for Congress, winning on the issue of the congressman’s support for the Iraq War.  Walz spent more than 10 years in Congress representing southern Minnesota before he decided to run for governor in 2017.  Walz had to work with a divided government in his first term, but after winning reelection in 2020, Democrats gained control of both houses of the legislature in Minnesota, and Walz was able to push through a slate of liberal policies that included free breakfast and lunch for all school children in the state.  Walz also worked to guarantee and expand women’s rights to reproductive health services in the state of Minnesota.  Today, the anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called Harris and her new running mate “the most pro-abortion presidential ticket America has ever seen.”

We have a liberal, a veteran, a former teacher and a governor from the Midwest running on the Democratic ticket, folks.  Today, Walz and Harris will appear at a rally in Philadelphia and start a seven-state, five-day swing through the battleground states. 

Donald Trump, who attacked Harris as “low IQ” on Saturday and questioned her race and ethnicity before the Association of Black Journalists earlier in the week, will appear at exactly one rally this week, in the state of Montana of all places, which he carried by 20 points in 2016 and 16 points in 2020.  Politico yesterday described Republican insiders as horrified by Trump’s “undisciplined, personal attacks on Harris.”  They must have picked the out-of-the-way-and-out-of-contention state of Montana to test-drive a new approach for Trump to take on the Harris-Walz ticket.

“The president is good at pushing multiple messages at the same time. We can walk and chew gum at the same time on this campaign,” a Trump campaign official told Politico. 

First, he’s not the president anymore, and second…good luck with that.