Walz is anti-elite gamble Harris needed to make. Democrats make play for center - Kelly

Tim Walz seemed like he had walked into a surprise party for someone else as he appeared on stage the other night in Philadelphia as the vice presidential running mate to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. He smiled broadly. He doubled over in laughter. He clapped. He led cheers. He yelled "wow" again and again and again.

But Walz should hardly be viewed as a surprise — or a party crasher. In fact, members of the Democratic Party ought to pay close attention to what is happening right before their eyes. Walz is the kind of Democrat who has long been missing from their party's leadership.

For years, Democrats have embraced a smarter-than-thou, cooler-than-you aura that has brought in plenty of campaign agenda-based donors from Hollywood and the Hamptons but turned off far too many voters on Main Street. Democrats don’t like to hear this. But it’s true. Former President Donald Trump’s followers galvanized around Hillary Clinton’s queen-of-smarts put-down that they were “deplorables.” And let’s not forget former President Barack Obama’s look-down-his-nose comment that far too many Midwestern conservatives “cling” to their guns and Bibles. 

Words matter. And what snooty Democrats said about conservatives for years opened deep wounds, starting way back during the Reagan administration.

Walz now has a chance to be a political balm of sorts. Yes, this guy throws his share of political grenades. But at least he has a sense of humor. And he's definitely not trying to tell you he's smarter or cooler than everyone else.

Far too often, Democratic policies that the party's candidates were required to embrace like a straight jacket seemed like they were hatched in grim graduate school seminars, not in real life, where people make compromises while sitting around a kitchen table and know how to laugh a little at their foibles. At the same time, voters were all too often placed in silos of racial, gender, class and religious identities — some for the party to eagerly embrace, some to willfully ignore.

No wonder Trump’s followers in their self-described MAGA nation felt consigned to second-class status by Democratic “elites.” But Walz, 60, the two-term governor of Minnesota, now challenges that calcified elite mold that Democrats concocted. It's about time.

Tim Walz is not a stereotypical Democratic elite

For starters, he’s not elite. Walz, with his linebacker body, looks like he belongs on a barstool at Cheers. In his spare time, he doesn’t wind-surf, like John Kerry. And, with his receding, gray Midwestern dad hair and a set of shoulders that tell you he has lifted a few bags of cement or dug a few ditches in his time, he definitely will never have that blow-dried John Edwards camera-ready look. As for the blue suit he wore on stage in Philadelphia, let’s just say that Walz seems a lot more comfortable in a T-shirt and jeans and a camouflage baseball cap that hunters prefer. And until he took the stage on Tuesday in Philadelphia with Harris, he had never spoken with the aid of a teleprompter.

Walz also missed another stop on the standard path of top Democrats. He didn’t go to law school. Incredibly, he is the first Democratic vice presidential candidate in more than half a century to miss the law school detour.

Equally incredible, Walz is a military veteran — another stop on the career political ladder that far too many Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) miss. After high school, he didn't head for college -- as so many young Democrats do. He enlisted in the National Guard. He ended up serving in the National Guard for two decades, rising to the rank of command sergeant major, and went to college on the modern equivalent of the GI Bill.

Since the 1970s, only George McGovern, Sargent Shriver, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore and John Kerry can be counted among the party’s presidential or vice presidential nominees who donned a military uniform. And most of them are from decidedly older generations — McGovern, Shriver, Carter and Bentsen from the World War II era; Mondale and Dukakis from the 1950s Korean War era and its aftermath; Gore and Kerry from 1960s Vietnam. Far too many self-described “new” and “woke” Democrats don’t even know how to salute.

But there’s more to the Walz story that doesn’t fit the prescribed Democratic mold.

He’s a gun owner — a crack shot, no less, who is not ashamed to tell everyone he loves to hunt wild turkeys. He’s a former high school social studies teacher and football coach who married a teacher. He also volunteered as the faculty advisor when his high school started a gay-straight alliance club for students.

He lives in a bright red corner of Minnesota where he managed to keep his congressional seat in 2016 even though Donald Trump won the district by double digits. The message here: Walz worked across party lines to win voters.

More important, perhaps, he talks differently from the far too many strident Democrats. Yes, he has achieved social media hero status among Democrats for his comments that Trump and the Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance strike him as “weird.”  But consider how he balanced his verbal dart at Trump and Vance with their followers.

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“This is the emperor wearing no clothes,” Walz said of Trump in a recent CNN interview, adding: “I want to be very clear: I’m not speaking about the people at his rallies. Those are my relatives” and “my neighbors. These are good people.” Message: He knows how to disagree but retain some respect for the other side.

The point here is that Walz seems to understand that most ordinary voters are hardly political zealots. Yes, they may register as Democrats or Republicans — and be classified by America's shallow political strategists as merely "blue" or "red." They may even wear MAGA baseball caps. But Walz seems to embrace the notion that far more Americans are "purple" — a mix of progressive and conservative beliefs on topics that range from Social Security to reproductive rights. The story of how he and his wife relied on in vitro fertilization to conceive their daughter, Hope, is not only inspiring but an enlightening reminder to anyone who understands that life sometimes requires us to make choices.

It’s the "purple" voters who want border security but not if it means putting kids in cages. Purple voters don’t want all guns outlawed — just those designed for the battlefield that are now the choice of far too many mass murderers. And while purple voters may not personally favor abortion for themselves, they understand that women should be allowed to make their own medical choices without government interference.

Tim Walz is a practical Democratic leader — and he's not alone

Walz seems to understand the middle-road mindset. And, among Democrats, he is hardly alone.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is decidedly moderate. In New Jersey, such Democratic House members as Josh Gottheimer, Mikie Sherrill and Andy Kim, the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate, often find themselves straddling a bipartisan middle ground. The same is true of New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul, who incurred the wrath of progressives after canceling congestion pricing, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who pushed back on policies that allowed migrants to flood the city and has called for tougher measures to combat street crime. And, of course, Delaware’s own Joe Biden has long searched for a middle path, sometimes clumsily.

This is not to say that Walz does not have his own firm beliefs, not to mention a decidedly progressive agenda that has already made him a target of conservatives. Since becoming Minnesota’s governor, he signed laws codifying abortion and transgender rights, background checks for gun owners, free student lunch programs, voting rights for former felons and the issuing of drivers' licenses for undocumented immigrants.

But consider how he responded to criticism of some of those measures. 

On abortion and transgender rights, Walz acknowledged that many voters may not personally want such measures for themselves but are open to others making such choices — all under the rule of “mind your own damn business.” With school lunches, he simply said that no child should have to study on an empty stomach — no matter the circumstances. With gun background checks, Walz added that he saw such rules as protecting children who were all too often victims of mass shooters in schools. 

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With immigrants, Walz offered a practical concern. He has said, for example, that large numbers of Thanksgiving turkeys for America’s homes are processed in his state by immigrants. If those immigrants are deported — as Trump has proposed — who prepares the turkeys? 

Good question. 

Such practicality lies at the heart of the image and message that Walz tries to convey. So does a willingness to confront mistakes.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when riots spread across Minneapolis, Walz delayed a decision on a request by the city’s mayor before ordering National Guard troops to help police restore order. 

Did he wait too long? One leading Minnesota Republican accused him of playing favorites with the rioters and looters — a charge that the Trump campaign has picked up.

The truth is that Walz was faced with a difficult choice. It took two days of riots before Minneapolis asked for help. But when the city finally asked for the Guard to be deployed, it offered no guidelines such as whether the Guard should come with guns, with permission to shoot or to make arrests. Such questions are important in deploying a military unit in a city.

Walz, the former Guard sergeant, delayed his decision about half a day after the city called for help — more than two days after rioting began. So it looked like Walz had sat on his heels for nearly three days.

The facts offer a more nuanced perspective, certainly worthy of criticism. After Floyd's death on a Monday and riots began that night and expanded dramatically the next day, the Guard arrived on Minneapolis streets in full force by Friday morning. Was that late? Under criticism, it's worth noting that Walz didn’t dodge questions. Soon after the fires died, he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “If the issue was that the state should have moved faster, that is on me." More recently, Walz told a press conference: “I simply believe that we try to do the best we can.”

Compare that with Trump’s blame-others response to questions that he failed as president to protect the U.S. Capitol from rioters on Jan. 6, 2021. To this day, Trump has never addressed the question of why he did not send help to the Capitol. In fact, Trump has promised to pardon the rioters.

A few weeks ago, as Trump tapped Sen. J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” as his running mate, I suggested that Vance might bring a decidedly different perspective to the presidential campaign that addressed the needs of forgotten Americans who were branded as “deplorables.” I still believe that is possible, despite Vance’s own verbal stumbles in recent days.

In Walz, America has another kind of opportunity — to hear from a Democrat who is not from the political equivalent of a cookie-cutter mold. So far, Democrats seem willing to listen. Will the rest of America?

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, as well as the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. A paperback edition with an updated epilogue of his 1995 book, "Color Lines," which chronicles race relations in a small New Jersey town after a police shooting and was called "American journalism at its best" by the Washington Post, was released last year. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in the Northeast, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com