Walz will help Harris because ‘he’s so normal’: A Midwesterner’s highest compliment | Opinion
What’s the opposite of weird? As every midwesterner knows, it’s “normal.” Which is why, “I don’t know; he’s just so normal,” is pretty much our highest compliment.
And that’s why Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 60-year-old former high school history teacher and coach who first tagged Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as “just weird” makes so much sense as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
He will help her across the Midwest, and beyond that will help her make this race not only normal versus weird, but normal versus normalized.
Because aren’t we tired of seeing the rule of law ignored, along with everything your mom ever told you about how to behave? Aren’t we done hearing democratic norms denigrated and dictators praised, as we did yet again when Trump actually congratulated Putin -- yay you, buddy! -- for agreeing to release people who never should have been arrested in the first place?
Joe Biden won in 2020 at least in part because Americans were exhausted by Trump’s constant lashing out. Walz is likewise an antidote to the 24/7 drama and snarling vilification of just about everybody.
When Ezra Klein of the New York Times asked Walz, who is a military veteran, former congressman and chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, how he planned to point out that Trump and Vance support policies way outside the mainstream without casting everyone who has supported them as weirdos, too, this is how he answered: “This is where I take offense to JD Vance and ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’ Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they’re not weird. I know they’re not Donald Trump.”
He said his team just has to “get them away from what he’s trying to sell because that’s not who they are. Just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he’s a good boy. That’s what I do. And that’s what those rallygoers do. That is exactly who they are, and they’re going through the same things all of our families are.”
Walz went on to say that the other guys are mostly selling fear: “And I think it’s kind of breaking that spell again of saying, ‘Look, he’s not offering you anything.’ And then we dang sure better be ready to offer something.”
If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can do that, they will be elected in November.
What’s more, if they can make this race a contest between put-downs about childless cat ladies versus remembering that we’re all neighbors who give belly rubs to good dogs, maybe America will see that we don’t have to be at each other’s throats all the time. If they do that, we’ll all win.
This story was originally published August 6, 2024 at 9:35 AM.
