So, Kamala Harris has found the yang to her yin in Tim Walz, the hitherto unknown governor of Minnesota. He is white-haired and fat to her groomed and svelte, is a regular dad, a teacher and a gun owner, who does rural stuff like ice fishing which really isn’t Kamala’s bag. He channels, according to our columnist Sarah Baxter, the favourite uncle vibe. If Kamala has wrapped up the pantsuit vote (that’s an actual group), Walz has something of Bernie Sanders’s youth appeal without his genuine radicalism.
And so we proceed towards the coronation of Kamala at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in a month’s time, with Walz as consort. She can be regal, he can play rough. His big achievement to date has been to identify the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird”, which isn’t quite in the Ronald Reagan school of quips but serves in this campaign as a wounding slur, though it does invite the playground riposte: “I’m weird? You’re weird!”
The Walz versus JD Vance contest may not be quite the the waltz that Walz makes out
We can then, assume that the honeymoon for Kamala and Tim will continue to the convention and beyond. But after that, the gloves will come off. They must.
Ever since Joe Biden ceded the field to his vice-president, the political momentum has gone all Harris’s way. She can do no wrong for most commentators; her last fight for the Democratic nomination when she was seen as way too liberal is a distant memory. Her failures on border security have been glossed over — so long as she avoids interviews with hardcore interrogators. Walz adds to the honeymoon vibe.
But the Walz versus JD Vance contest — male on male — may not be quite the the waltz that Walz makes out. There’s been an inordinate focus on Vance’s imprudent remark about childless cat ladies which he made in 2021 before he entered the Senate. But for Walz to jeer at him for his rise from Hillbilly to Yale graduate with billionaire backing has an odd ring: upward mobility isn’t a bad thing in the US. And interestingly the weapon that has been deployed to counter all this is Mrs Vance.
Usha Vance is a daughter of Indian immigrants, a woman of colour, of Hindu background and sharp as a knife, a top lawyer. She’s defended his catlady remark as a quip. She’s the human rebuttal to the notion he’s anti-woman.
But for now Kamala and Tim reign supreme. Make the most of it, folks…
