Tim Walz Is Too Damn Nice
I can't forget about Walz's disastrous vice presidential debate performance.
Vikings fans had tried for months to tell me about Tim Walz.
Between dooming about their precious Vikes, these fellas in 2022 and 2023 extolled Walz’s straightforward approach to governing Minnesota and ramming through progressive priorities with a bare legislative majority. What he was doing, they insisted, was altogether different than other Democratic governors in purple states.
As those governors sought a middle path and involved Republicans in the various machinations of state-level lawmaking, Walz offered a kind, paternal midwest smile to Minnesota GOP legislators and told them to get fucked. Your input will not be necessary at this time. But you're welcome to watch us do good things for the people of Minnesota, Walz seemed to say.
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I finally listened to the Minnesota bros and I’m glad I did. Reading about Walz’s leadership on an anti-hunger bill was exhilarating for me (and any millennial who is exhausted by Democrats’ commitment to bipartisanship, a failed concept that unilaterally disarms Democratic lawmakers). Walz and the state’s Democratic leaders, with a slim majority in the Minnesota legislature, passed a bill that would provide $388 million over two years to ensure kids had access to food in Minnesota public schools.
The legislation did not receive a single Republican vote. Many of them cried crocodile tears about the cost of the food-for-children program, knowing the state had a budget surplus exceeding $17 billion. I'm once again upset while writing.
I wrote about Walz in April 2023 as part of a trend: Democratic governors in the wake of Trump’s destruction were simply ignoring Republican opposition to their priorities, truly loony left-wing shit like making healthcare more accessible to state residents and making it slightly harder to buy machine guns and creating fair electoral maps and providing housing and sufficient food for those without. These Democrats were deploying what I termed a no-faith approach to politics: It wasn’t exactly a rejection of the right’s all-consuming bad faith, but rather a sustained effort to ignore the right completely. If that sounds familiar, it's because that's how Democratic lawmakers are treated in Republican-held legislatures: As nonentities.
Denny Carter
Republicans have shown for at least the past quarter century that they are not good-faith negotiating partners, and after generations of winning the Fell For It Again Award – an award the ruinously feckless Chuck Schumer is determined to keep – state-level Dems had had enough during the Biden era. They no longer had the time or patience to engage in the precious bipartisan law-crafting mainstream media outlets have demanded of Democrats, and only Democrats. So Tim Walz and his ilk said enough. We’re done with all this bullshit. Let’s make life materially better for folks and see where things fall.
Walz as a national Democratic leader and a potential presidential nominee is a prospect getting lots of talk as the happy-go-lucky governor pledges to visit town halls across the country where cowardly Republican elected officials – seemingly immune to shame – have refused to show up after discovering that Americans don’t particularly like an unelected billionaire staging a coup in service of the authoritarian president he bought and paid for last year.
Denny Carter
Walz’s pledge to drop in on these town halls and engage Americans in good faith about exactly what is going on in this acute constitutional crisis has been lauded by both leftists who generally hate the Democratic Party and mainline liberals who twist themselves into intellectual pretzels trying to defend the party as our Last Hope. Walz has reportedly received hundreds of town hall requests from the reddest parts of the US. And yes, it is very much worthwhile to fill the vacuum created by GOP officials who have abandoned their constitutional duty to control the nation’s purse strings and followed John Roberts’ lead in anointing a sundowning madman as America’s first king.
I like Walz. I’m a fan. I find him refreshing and affable and relatable and engaging. He’s an excellent politician without seeming like a politician, a rare and useful skill. I’m also deeply skeptical of Walz as a leading figure who can deliver the United States from this hell because, like you, I remember his vice presidential debate performance against JD Vance last fall. It was, in a word, disastrous.
I recently rewatched the Walz-Vance debate and found myself cringing all over again as Vance played Walz for a fool before a national audience unfamiliar with both men. Walz was impossibly nice to Vance while Vance put on an evil little smile to talk about Trump’s plans for mass deportations as housing policy and ignoring climate change and weaponizing the federal government against Trump’s many enemies. Vance, who knowingly lied about Haitian migrants in Ohio to ramp up the election year hate machine, took full advantage of his too-nice sparring partner and used his debate club skills to advance the fascist project into the American public’s conscious mind while Walz bumbled and stumbled and nervously glanced around the room. Perhaps he wasn’t ready for primetime. Vance sensed as much and pounced. He even engaged Walz in some surface-level good-natured exchanges; it came off as a lion toying with its food.
We all remember the horrors of watching senile Joe Biden make Trump look like an intellectually fit presidential candidate. What we might not remember as well is Walz failing to counter Vance’s slick lies and half truths in his months-long effort to dehumanize migrants seeking a better life in the US. Walz needed to be fucking mean to Vance. Instead, he was nice, even gracious, to the make-believe Son of Appalachia. Vance knowingly glanced at the camera while Walz spoke, telling us with his eyeliner that this guy did not have what it took to effectively fight Vance (nothing wrong with a dude wearing eyeliner, of course, but let’s be real about Vance wearing more eyeliner than a member of My Chemical Romance in 2004).
That’s why I’m skeptical of Walz as a leading figure in whatever comes after Trump and Musk’s attack on the country: He is incapable of being an asshole. Everything happening in politics today says the left is going to need more assholes.
Walz has said the Harris campaign was far too risk averse last fall against the dopamine machine that is the Trump universe. “We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” Walz told reporters in early March, comparing the Harris campaign to a football team trying desperately not to lose in the game’s closing minutes. “In football parlance, we were in a prevent defense to not lose when we never had anything to lose because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”
Walz’s assessment is half right. The Harris campaign, in the heady days of late July and early August, was outright rejecting the stale Leslie Knope politics of standard Democratic presidential campaigns in favor of an extremely online approach that engaged young folks and endlessly ridiculed Trump instead of presenting charts and graphs showing exactly why the fascist game show host was wrong on the issues.
Some Democratic elected officials have said the Harris campaign did not properly deploy Walz as a big, smiling weapon in midwestern states that somehow turned to Trump four years after he tried to overthrow the American government. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he “wished they would’ve put [Walz] out there more” because “the world seemed to want more Tim Walz, and there were times when I wish they could’ve gotten more Tim Walz.”
Maybe that’s right. And maybe Walz recognizes the Democratic Party’s risk averse nature is a recipe for paralysis by analysis. I would say trying to be all things to all voters is a recipe for electoral disaster, but Trump is all things to all people and has dominated every aspect of national politics and culture for a decade. My primary hesitation for embracing Walz as someone who can break through the algorithmically controlled far-right media ecosystem and break the fascist spell is his demeanor. He is far too nice, and these fascists are mean motherfuckers who respond only to strength.
For all my questions about whether Walz has the juice – or the hair of a president – I’m in lockstep with him on this: “There is no charismatic leader who is coming to save us.”
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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