Tim who for VP? Walz gives the Harris campaign a rural, everyman voice | R. Bruce Anderson
This summer, I skipped a planned extended trip overseas. My kid and their wife were moving house up to Nebraska, and they had four cats to move as well, so they brought me in to drive a 35-foot U-Haul full of theater equipment up over the mountains and into the apparently endless Midwest.
It’s a familiar part of the world for me. I taught at a tiny school in Nebraska, had a brief discernment interval at Sewanee, and then moved back to kids-proximity at another tiny Methodist school in eastern Kansas. In the process, I came to truly appreciate that flat, but very beautiful, part of the world.
It’s the great interminable plains of wheat, corn and sunflowers; and ranching, especially in Western Nebraska. It’s the historical home of the “Grange,” a populist movement of the 1860s and '70s, started by a crabby old farmer named Oliver Kelly, who thought planters were better off working against the transport interests together – in a kind of guild – than trying to cut their own individual deals with the railroads.
It’s the kind of cautious progressivism native to both Kansas and Nebraska, up to the northernmost tier of farming states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. It’s also the kind of restrained conservatism that led Kansans to reject an amendment to their state constitution that would have allowed the legislature to bury women’s reproductive rights.
And it’s the kind of reserved, reasonable, but unapologetic political viewpoint of Kamala Harris’ choice for the vice presidency.
When Harris was weighing the potential people for her VP slot, she had little time, a host of contenders and a dizzying array of strategic possibilities to consider. When last week turned, she was down to three: the popular but lefty governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, who had a solid record of getting the vote out for his party; Mark Kelly of Arizona, clearly a pivotal figure in that battleground state; and a bit of an dark horse, Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, a state already in Harris’ column, and not a national figure of the status of Shapiro (the “brain trust” choice among many political scientists) or even Kelly.
To those looking only at the graphs, the numbers and the electoral vote strategies, Walz makes little sense. Despite that gibberish about “pivot counties” and the Blue Wall, he’s a relatively conservative cat, far from the urban core leftism of many Democrats; cast more in the ideological role of a Chuck Hagel than a Chuck Schumer.
His personal history is remarkably clean and sharp. He grew up in the farmlands of Nebraska, joined the National Guard at 17, went to school out in the sandhills at Chadron State College (no Harvard/Yale background here), and has been a teacher and a football coach for much of his life.
He and his wife settled in Mankato, Minnesota, where he eventually took up politics. Above all, his background is rural – an ever-smaller group of Americans who are increasingly forgotten in the American policy process.
Even The Onion, a satirical publication, had a hard time lampooning Walz. When they said his most-used phrase was“shucks,” I thought, “well, once again, The Onion reports reality."
Walz is, however, an experienced and astute administrator. It has occurred to more than one of us out here that perhaps he was not chosen for his campaign style, or his voter attraction, or even his willingness to take on his opponents in debate.
Perhaps the real appeal of Governor Walz is that he may, in fact, know a thing or two about governing that trumps (no pun intended) all of his attributes as a campaigner. We might be seeing someone selected not for what he can do for the ticket, but what he can do for the office.
And that would be a true injection of reason in this treacherous mess of an election year: someone standing for office who may actually know how to do their job.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.