Tim Walz fails on the national stage

J. D. Vance fans, last night your man won his own personal Super Bowl. Tim Walz fans, your guy may not be ready for the major leagues. The good news for the Minnesota governor is that there’s not a single smudge on any of his timepieces, and he can clearly see what time it is . . . because Vance absolutely cleaned his clock.

Walz seemed small on the national stage, and he knew it.

Being a Democratic statewide official in a deep-blue state ranks among the easiest jobs in America. Once you’ve won your primary — which can be hard fought and nasty — you’ve got that job until you choose to retire, or until you are term-limited out. It’s extremely unlikely you’ll lose a subsequent primary, because while neither party tosses out incumbents much, Democrats almost never do it. (That’s usually the case down ticket as well; of the 2,214 Democratic state legislators who ran for reelection this year, 98.5 percent won their primaries.)

What’s more, your state’s media will often be a wind at your back. Your gaffes will rarely matter; scandals, mistakes, and policy failures will be explained away; you’ll always have the fundraising advantage unless you’re challenged by a self-funding billionaire; and no matter how bad you are, the biggest names in your state’s media world will always endorse you for reelection. What are they going to do, vote for a Republican?

Democratic statewide officials in deep-blue states lose their jobs so rarely, they might as well have tenure. They play the game of politics on easy mode.

The 2024 Democratic ticket features two figures shaped by the political cultures of their deep-blue states. Kamala Harris’s lone competitive general election came in 2010, the first time she ran for state attorney general. Tim Walz’s last competitive election came in his 2016 House race. Since then, neither one has had to break a sweat in a general election, unless you want to count Harris’s role in the 2020 presidential election.

The Washington Post’s Dylan Wells recently called Walz “a surprisingly bubble-wrapped campaigner.” Almost simultaneously, in a long profile of Walz in the Atlantic — for which the Harris campaign did not make Walz available for an interview, go figure — Mark Leibovich wrote:

It’s a bit of a mystery why Walz has largely stopped doing national media, especially given how effective he was over the summer. The campaign seems to have trapped him in the same hyper-protective Bubble Wrap it has placed around Harris, and that was placed around Biden before her.

Last night, Walz’s inexperience with tough races and tough questions showed. Once the Bubble Wrap came off, he was supposed to demonstrate toughness, a steely spine, a righteous anger over Republicans’ outrages, and the strong will of a man who’s ready to be commander in chief. Instead, Walz looked and sounded like he was made of Nerf.

Tuesday night couldn’t have gone too much better for J. D. Vance. He was as polished and smooth as your mom’s fine porcelain tableware that she takes out only at Christmas. The contrast between the prepared, detail-oriented, focused Ohio senator and the erratic, improvising, erupting volcano atop the ticket couldn’t be starker. A vice-presidential nominee only gets two big moments in the spotlight in a presidential campaign — the convention speech and the debate. And Vance aced both.

Vance looked and sounded like a man who knew, no matter what happens in November, that he’s probably running for president in 2028.

The contrast helped the Republican. That CNN report that Walz was nervous might not have been expectation-setting spin after all.

The Minnesota governor looked like a guy who had no expectation of being on a nationally televised debate stage three months ago, and who realized early in the night that the moment was too big for him. His default facial expression is one of worry; he does not have a commanding presence. He looked down to take notes so often, someone on social media asked if he was working on a crossword puzzle.

Probably the Minnesota governor’s worst moment was his meandering, desperation-odor-emitting filibuster when moderator Margaret Brennan asked arguably the lone tough question directed to him:

Margaret Brennan: You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn’t travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy?  You have two minutes.

Tim Walz: Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn’t get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I’m proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of ’89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect. And I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years. And in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people. Working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans’ benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice. So, look, my commitment has been from the beginning, to make sure that I’m there for the people, to make sure that I get this right. I will say more than anything, many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn’t be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing. So, this is about trying to understand the world. It’s about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it’s putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is. My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.

MB: Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?

TW: No. All I said on this was, is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest, went in, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.

In other words, “I’m a knucklehead at times,” please put me a heartbeat away from the presidency in a dangerous world.

That Wells profile noted that on Saturday, Walz was in Ann Arbor, Mich., watching the football game, and “during the game, Walz sat with former congressman Beto O’Rourke and met with more students — all behind the closed doors of a luxury suite.”

Walz’s choice of campaign buddy is either ironic or appropriate. I remember in January 2018, Texas Monthly magazine touting O’Rourke as “The Democrats’ Great Hope.” The issue featured a long — I mean long, roughly 9,000 words — profile of O’Rourke. As I made my way through the article, I kept waiting for the paragraph that would explain what made O’Rourke so special, and why he was being touted as the party’s great hope in such a reliably Republican state. (This was just a few years after the 2013 “Game On?” cover featuring Julian Castro, Joaquin Castro, and Wendy Davis.) But that paragraph never came; O’Rourke seemed like just another standard-issue Democratic congressman.

What’s so special about Tim Walz? He looks, sounds, and acts like just another standard-issue Midwestern Democratic blue-state governor. His state government is full of scandals, and on the two biggest tests he faced in office — Covid and the George Floyd riots — he flunked. He’s presided over an unprecedented spending spree financed by unsustainable federal handouts. There’s little to no evidence he’s helped Harris in those critical “blue wall” states.

That Walz profile in the Atlantic included observations by Blois Olson, a longtime political commentator in the Twin Cities:

Olson says that in his brief career as a running mate, Walz has benefited from the frenetic pace of contemporary politics: the fact that people tend to experience candidates as impressionistic blurs and pay little attention to anything that lies below the surface. Being able to cultivate a persona and ace a role can get you a long way. Olson said that Walz has unquestionably proved himself a talented political performer throughout his career. But veteran Walz watchers can also grow weary of his practiced yokel act. “Oh, he is totally full of s***,” Olson said of Walz. “And he’s also really good at being full of s***.” Olson seemed to mean this as a compliment.

Once you peel back the folksiness, what have you got? As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, “There is no there there.”

The standard thing to say is that vice-presidential debates don’t change much, and that’s true enough. Walz probably wasn’t bad enough last night to really hurt Harris’s odds of winning the presidency — is anyone going to change his or her vote based on how Walz and Vance did? — but the argument that he was a weak choice as running mate got stronger. Do you think Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro would have flopped on that stage last night?

The first day of October packed a month’s worth of dramatic events into one day: Iran firing a barrage of missiles at Israel and the world’s lone Jewish state pledging retaliation, a dockworkers’ strike that could have far-reaching economic effects, the South beginning the long and difficult process of recovering from the second-deadliest hurricane in the past 50 years.

The events of Tuesday demonstrate that the presidency is not a show-business job. It’s not about gold sneakers or coconut-tree memes or “vibes.” It is a leadership and management job. Right now, Joe Biden is barely there — mumbling, shuffling, rarely appearing in front of the cameras, and barely coherent when he is. This country is suffering from a real dearth of leadership right now.