The Democrats’ Carhartt Messiah? “Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need?” Ezra Klein titled his recent New York Times podcast interview with Kamala Harris’ veep pick. “Tim Walz is the dad an entire generation wish they had instead of the one they lost to Fox News,” reads a tweet that has already resonated with some 46,000 people. “In Walz, Harris Sees a Battleground Strategy Dressed in Carhartt,” reads a New York Times analysis by Lisa Lerer, referring to the workwear brand. “Walz is going to spend the rest of the campaign hosting daily livestreams explaining to voters how to fix a running toilet, how to check the oil levels on your car, and how to properly patch a hole in your drywall,” jokes a politico on X.
“It was mesmerizing in the sense that it’s been a while since I’ve seen a rally like that either on TV or in person,” journalist Mike Barnicle told MSNBC, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s rally in Pennsylvania yesterday, after Harris had announced the Minnesota governor as her vice-presidential pick. “And watching it, you could just sense the power in the hall—and it was the power of joy, the power of laughter, the power of hope for the future.…It’s been a long time since any aspect of American politics has put a smile on anyone’s face.”
The reception has been warm and cuddly from much of the media. But Tim Walz is not your dad. He’s not your handyman. He’s not even necessarily that pragmatic of a pick for Harris, who seems to be telegraphing ideological preferences—bigger government with higher taxes and a more expansive welfare state, as well as supplying an olive branch to the progressive far-left. Embracing a more moderate swing-stater like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro might have been a more pragmatic choice.
“My biggest worry about the discourse is that people mash together a few things that are true—Minnesota is in the Midwest, Walz represented a rural district, Walz has a kind of gruff white guy manner—into a false impression that Tim Walz’s gruff white guy manner has made him popular in the rural Midwest despite conventional liberal politics,” writes Matthew Yglesias at Slow Boring. “The actual story is that Minnesota is a better-educated, more urban, and more liberal state than Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, so a conventional liberal can do well there without over-performing in the rural Midwest.”
The perception of Walz as a folksy Midwestern dad, especially when juxtaposed with Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) (whom Walz branded weird, leading to a strange news cycle in which other Democrats kept hopping aboard the bandwagon), is rather titillating to much of the coastal elite news media. The question is whether that perception will actually be shared by swing-state voters.
Walz’s actual record: For better or worse, Walz has—over the course of his almost 20 years in politics—embraced quite progressive policies, shifting further left over time. He’s a big fan of hiking taxes, both income and gas. He presided over state agencies partnering with all kinds of wasteful and fraudulent organizations, doling out taxpayer dollars to entities that were bad stewards of the funds. He continued to allow this during the pandemic, when he wanted to dish out “hero pay” to so-called frontline workers, which led to some 333,000 people claiming they were eligible when they were in fact not (or, in some cases, outright fraud, such as attempts by, uh, dead people to get checks). The state agency in charge doled out checks anyway, and the whole program became derailed.
During COVID-19, Walz engaged in much the same authoritarianism as his blue-state governor ilk: caps on indoor and outdoor gatherings, mask mandates, COVID snitching hotlines (which the executive order specified could be enforced with 90 days in jail for violators), and a nursing home policy quite similar to New York’s.
And what does Minnesota have to show for all this folksy dad governance? An outmigration problem!
“IRS data show that the state loses four households earning more than $200,000 for every three that it gains,” notes Cato’s Chris Edwards and Ilana Blumsack on their Fiscal Policy Report Card, in which they rate America’s governors. Tim Walz earned an “F.”
Walz is not even uniquely effective at governing, as some defenders on the left might claim. “The key thing to note about his time as governor is that Democrats won a narrow majority in the Minnesota legislation in the 2022 midterms,” writes Yglesias. “Even though Minnesota is a left-of-center state, they hadn’t had a Democratic trifecta in a long time. So there were just tons and tons of standard Democratic bills that had been backed up for years, and Walz signed a flurry of legislation. This didn’t create the People’s Republic of Minnesota or anything, it mostly reflected the fact that the pre-2022 policy status quo in Minnesota was unreasonable conservative relative to the underlying partisanship.”
The Walz pick probably won’t affect much of anything. Most voters who are less politically engaged, who live in swing states, probably won’t care too much or spend that much time looking into Walz’s record. But the pick is interesting for what it says about Harris—that she’s making a big gesture to the progressive left—and what it says about the media—that they’re oddly hungry for a nice-guy father figure, and may be blinded by their love goggles.
Scenes from New York: Journalist/independent videographer Samuel Seligson has been charged with a hate crime. Authorities say he participated in vandalizing the Brooklyn Heights home of Anne Pasternak, who is the director of the Brooklyn Museum, with red paint. The vandalism accuses her of being a “white-supremacist Zionist.” Seligson’s attorney, Leena Widdi, says he was acting in his capacity as a journalist. Others allege he’s a member of the extremist group antifa and that he has a long history of targeting Jews in their homes. Still others note that Seligson was arrested not in possession of any camera equipment, but rather serving as the lookout for the vandals, and seemingly operating in no journalistic capacity.
“Community organizers have staged protests at the Brooklyn Museum throughout Ms. Pasternak’s tenure, which began in 2015,” reports The New York Times. “During the Israel-Hamas war, the museum has become a target for pro-Palestinian activists who claim there is a link between wealthy trustees and the military-industrial complex in Israel—an accusation that museum officials have denied.”
QUICK HITS
I bring you good news and bad. Last night, member of the “squad” Cori Bush, who serves as one of Missouri’s representatives in the U.S. House, lost her primary. Unfortunately, Justin Amash lost his Michigan Senate primary as well. “Some of the best evidence that we still live in a free-market economy is that Big Tech, hated by [former President Donald] Trump, performed very well during his presidency, and Big Oil, hated by Biden, has been performing very well during his,” writes Dominic Pino at National Review. “If you can make a bunch of money investing in companies that the president hates, that’s a pretty good sign you live in a free country.” The Biden administration has decided to phase out single-use plastic cutlery across all federal government departments and buildings, as if this is the thing that will save the environment. “After [Hugo] Chávez’s death, [Nicolás] Maduro continued to pay lip service to socialism—and to blame the United States for all of Venezuela’s problems—but he had no real ideological fervor,” writes Reason‘s Jim Epstein. “‘The Terminal Stage of Communism Is a Mafia,’ as Martin Gurri recently observed about post-Castro Cuba, and the same insight applies perfectly to Venezuela.” EVERGREEN TWEET:
All the misinformation reporters can go fuck traffic cones.
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) August 7, 2024
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