When John McCain announced young and perky Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, Jon Stewart played the tape and remarked that McCain had unveiled “his new wife!”. He probably wouldn’t do that gag today. Nevertheless, it works well for Kamala Harris’ announcement of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running-mate for the upcoming election. “Kids, this is Tim. He’s going to be your new… well, let’s not say dad… What’s that, Stephen? Yes, I know, Tim is also your maths teacher. Oh come on, it’s not going to be embarrassing at all. Tim?” “Hey kids! Surprise time. Who wants to go to Grill’d?”
Walz is an interesting choice. The clamour from Democrat centrists and pollsters was for Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, to do whatever needed to be done to win the Keystone state. But Shapiro offered the big problem for the Dems that he is not only a fervent Zionist, but had also been a volunteer for the IDF.
The Democrats know that to get out the vote, they rely on campaigning groups that are a lot further to the left than they are — and that such a barefoot army is their greatest advantage against the Republicans, whose supporters tend to be a mobility vehicle cavalry.
Dem ground forces will put up with a lot, but the IDF would be a dealbreaker for many. There is also, though no-one wants to say it, the issue of having a ticket composed of a woman of colour and a Jewish man. Like it or not, some of the hitherto Trump-leaning independents in winnable states like Iowa, who might now be considering a more stable leadership, might well find that a dealbreaker. Antisemitism in the US, however much the right tries to frame the left with it, remains rooted in midwest Anglo-descended culture and rustbelt European-Christian-descended cultures.
Walz is someone Iowa can live with. He’s a schlubby, middle-aged white Minnesotan in a $79 suit, ill-fitting enough to appear tailored to be so, and a haircut so sketchy that people have been saying he looks “like an Australian”. Steve Martin has reportedly declined the offer to play him on Saturday Night Live. With those Specsavers glasses and the white koala clumps on either side of the head, I’m thinking the role should go to, in shoe lifts, John Howard.
But Walz is also acceptable to the left. He’s from the Minnesotan social liberal tradition that produced Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, South Dakota’s George McGovern and other, heh, winners. Nevertheless, whatever their electoral fortunes, this tradition has provided a great deal of the political-economic progressive heft of the Democrats over decades, through its unique state Democratic-Farmer-Labor party (DFL).
Founded by the Scandinavians who settled the frozen state — the Germans got Wisconsin and founded the Republican Party there, to bust slavery — the DFL is the only Labor party that gained significant power in the US. It’s now been all but dissolved into the Democrats proper, but in its time it pioneered state health insurance, civil rights, and helped force the crisis within the party that made it eventually remove its support from southern white power racists and swing behind civil rights.
Walz is firmly of that tradition. But it’s a measure of how far class and economic politics have decayed in the US that the added advantage of choosing a Minnesotan — a place whose term for “casserole” is “hot dish” — is holding onto the state. What was once the last bastion of a social democracy that promoted social unity — its greatest cultural products are Bob Dylan, Prince and Garrison Keillor, and the modern shopping mall — has followed the same trajectory as much of the Midwest in recent years.
Radical class politics and system consciousness have decayed, and cultural populism has taken its place. It’s a measure of how strong the tradition is that Minnesota has remained Democrat, while other once farmer-worker states such as the Dakotas are now Republican strongholds.
So Walz, as his performance showed — he was the Democrat who dubbed Trump and Vance “weird” — is not only progressive enough, but confident in it. He’s not hung up on being white. Which is good because he’s so white he’s almost translucent. He’s so white he’s the entire attendance at a Guided By Voices concert. He’s so white he, well, you saw that video with the stereo equipment. He’s so white he could run for an inner-city Greens seat in Melbourne.
The Republicans are now throwing everything at him. That he has inflated his military service record, that he *checks notes* removed an unfair tax on tampons, that he has strong links with China, being a white-haired nerd who ran a tour company taking students there, speaks some Mandarin and oh my god he is an Australian politician.
None of this appears to be landing, because it’s the Republicans attacking as if it were 2004 and they are still the party of rectitude and stable governance. A fiction then, but they could get away with it. But in 2016, with Trump, they became the gonzo insurgent party, and that has been consolidated since. Having celebrated anarchy and disruption, they are now trying to paint the Democrats as, erm, wild and disruptive.
This has left the Trump campaign with nowhere to go but the next stage of gonzo, which is psychosis. They are badly missing the presence of a traditional VP pick who could have given the ticket a sense of stability, from which to portray Harris-Walz as the last iteration of the 60s, a Robert Crumb cartoon come to life. Now with Walz as stepdad-who-doesn’t-hit-you — “Hey, buddy, instead of Grand Theft Auto, how about I show you a game called Yahtzee?” — they really don’t have a counter-narrative, and Trump and Vance are creating a sort of gonzo wave interference pattern (and, as Dean Martin remarked, that’s a moiré.)
The polls are mixed, which is a win for Harris-Vance. The two most recent, CNBC and Rasmussen, still have Trump ahead by two to four, but a run of polls before that has Harris up three to four. Don’t be fooled by the renewed optimism and ecstasy throughout much of the media. Trump voters, including his wider penumbra, have given up on the media altogether, Fox News included. The whole thing is now a progressive echo chamber. Trump, this spare-parts Frankenstein version of his 2016 self, could still shamble to an electoral college win while everyone’s cheering Harris’s snappy comebacks.
Still, it’s a good and astute choice. Out of San Francisco, Harris has chosen the mayor of Lake Wobegon, microcosm Merica — where all the men are on meth, all the women are working for tips at the diner, and all the social indicators are below average. Welcome new political stepdad. “Hey kids, want to learn about a thing called calculus?”
Is Tim Walz a good choice? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
