No doubt many Democrats will insist that Tim Walz’s arrest for drunk and reckless driving in 1995 is ancient history, and not relevant to the decision before the voters in November.
When Walz first ran for Congress in 2006, his campaign repeatedly made false statements about the details of his 1995 arrest for drunk and reckless driving.
According to court and police records connected to the incident, Walz admitted in court that he had been drinking when he was pulled over for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone in Nebraska. Walz was then transported by a state trooper to a local hospital for a blood test, showing he had a blood alcohol level of .128, well above the state’s legal limit of 0.1 at the time.
But in 2006, his campaign repeatedly told the press that he had not been drinking that night, claiming that his failed field sobriety test was due to a misunderstanding related to hearing loss from his time in the National Guard. The campaign also claimed that Walz was allowed to drive himself to jail that night.
That arrest was 29 years ago, Democrats will argue. Which is true, and all well and good . . . except that in the closing days of the 2000 presidential election, the country learned about George W. Bush being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in Maine in 1976. Which was 24 years earlier.
Democrats may attempt the ridiculous argument that a DUI charge from 24 years ago is relevant but one from 29 years ago is not, or that the issue for Bush was hiding it, even though as seen above, Walz misled voters about the arrest for years.
At the time, in 2000, most voters said Bush’s DUI arrest didn’t matter, but in his memoir, Bush strategist Karl Rove laid out the evidence that the consequences were huge:
“Did this last-minute revelation of Bush’s decades-old DUI hurt?” Rove continued. “Yes, a lot. First, it knocked us off message at a critical time. . . . Second, we had made a big issue of Gore’s credibility and now we had a problem with Bush’s. . . . [A] number of people who supported Bush flipped and went for Gore. Second, a larger number of voters — especially evangelicals and social conservatives — decided not to vote, taking votes away from Bush. . . .“Before the news broke, we were up . . . in Maine. . . . Bush went on to lose Maine. . . . If Bush did drop 2 percent nationally in the vote because of the DUI revelation, then it probably cost him four additional states that he lost by less than 1 percent — New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Oregon. Had he won them, . . . [it] would have allowed him to win the White House without Florida. . . . Of the things I would redo in the 2000 election, making a timely announcement about Bush’s DUI would top the list.”
