On Tim Walz, Stolen Valor, and American Values

Not too long ago, well before Kamala Harris made her pick for running mate, I spoke with someone in the media who told me Tim Walz was their "dark horse" candidate. I knew very little about him, to be honest, and did some digging.

The surface-level stuff - his handling of COVID-19, the policies he supported, etc. - made it seem like a long shot. Surely, I figured, Harris would not go with someone so far to the left, someone who is just as likely (if not more likely) to alienate blue-collar workers in the Midwest as he is to attract him.

Harris herself is not going to be strong with those voters, and they are the ones who the Democratic Party needs to reach out to. It's why I think J.D. Vance was a smarter pick for Trump than some people initially thought.

As I mentioned there:

Vance's point is that there are forces out there actively working against that ladder - the American Dream - and that it is the role of leadership to use the government to make that ladder more accessible, not less. Vance was able to escape the poverty and addiction that tore his community apart, but not everyone could. For people like Vance, that is the injustice, and the power of the government can be used as a force for change, to make the American Dream more achievable.

The Democrats are trying very hard to make Tim Walz into what Harris needs, and I don't think it comes off as well as they think it does. To them, a guy who hunts, wears camo, and "just says it like it is" is Midwest enough to connect with the base voters Harris is at risk of losing. But Walz supports policies that don't jive with the core values of the American Midwest.

Which brings us to the "stolen valor" story.

Tim Walz absolutely deliberately phrased some public statements to make it sound like he faced combat while in the Army National Guard. In other public appearances, he downright said he went to war. At best, he was in Europe during the war in Afghanistan, which does not count, no matter how nuanced you try to get.

He did know that his battalion was at risk of being deployed. At best, he knew there were rumors of that possibility.

He did retire before that could happen, and he did so claiming it was so he could run for Congress, though it was and still is perfectly accepted to remain in service while running for public office.

The news cycle has not been kind to Walz, and it has been a distracting start for the Harris-Walz campaign. But, more than that, the idea that is now circulating - that Walz abandoned soldiers he was supposed to lead - is not an idea that plays well in the crowd that Walz is supposed to be bringing into the Harris coalition in November.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton ceded blue-collar Midwesterners to Trump in favor of urban turnout. It failed miserably. In 2020, Biden reclaimed a good chunk of them while the economy was crashing due to COVID-19. This election is going to favor 2016 more than 2020 because Trump is not the incumbent, he will not be blamed for the economy, and the current ticket is going to struggle more to keep those blue-collar workers.

None of this is to say that Trump is going to win. It will be a tight race if the current numbers hold. But the current numbers also reflect the honeymoon period for Harris-Walz. A couple of weeks from now, it could look different again. But Trump is now in a much better position to recapture the voters he nabbed in 2016. And there are Democrats (as well as folks in the mainstream media) who are going to be quick to declare the tide has definitely turned in the favor of the Harris-Walz ticket.

Nothing is certain, but I do believe that Harris has made a major mistake picking Walz.