ANALYSIS — I don’t remember much from our candidate interview with Tim Walz, but I’m going to guess I wasn’t impressed. In my defense, it was nearly 19 years ago, when Walz ran in southern Minnesota’s 1st District.
Even though I’d look much smarter now if I said back then that he was a rising star and future vice presidential material, something closer to the opposite is probably true. When we met with Walz on Nov. 10, 2005, he was a global geology teacher at Mankato West High School and a first-time candidate who had served in the Army National Guard. He was running with no money and no consultants. When we asked about potential personal money, he talked about some in-kind contributions for gas. That usually isn’t the recipe for success.
A couple weeks before our interview, my colleague Stuart Rothenberg listed Walz and others in a group of “mediocre fundraisers with plenty to prove” in his Roll Call column. At the time, there wasn’t any evidence that the Walz campaign was going anywhere fast except for a nascent positive national political environment for Democrats.
