According to an actual tweet from the New Hampshire Libertarian Party, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom Vice President Kamala Harris chose as her running mate last week, “has been a leech his entire life.” The message proceeded to list the various self-serving positions Walz has held, including “public school teacher” and “veteran.”
If that sounds deranged, well, that’s because it is. The Trump campaign and its surrogates in the conservative media ecosystem have been desperately trying to paint the 60-year-old Walz as Che Guevara with a Midwestern accent. “This is the most woke, left-wing candidate she could have picked, out of all the names that surfaced,” former American Conservative Union head Matt Schlapp said.
That’s obviously untrue. If Harris wanted to swing hard left, she could have chosen any number of progressives: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sens. Sherrod Brown or Bernie Sanders, or even twice-failed former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. They were all about as close to her short list as I was to starting as power forward for the New York Knicks.
If Harris wanted to swing hard left, she could have chosen any number of progressives.
Instead, she picked “a Norman Rockwell painting sprung to life,” David Axelrod, the mastermind of former President Barack Obama’s political rise, quipped the other day on NPR.
On Thursday, Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he described Walz as dangerous and out of touch with Americans. In fact, Walz is firmly within the American consensus when it comes to actual policy: He is strongly in favor of reproductive choice, as are 85% of Americans, to some extent; Walz enacted paid family leave, another wildly popular policy; as governor, he has pushed for Minnesota to get its energy from renewable resources, in keeping with Americans’ growing recognition of the threat posed by catastrophic weather and elevated temperatures.
If anything, Walz is so thoroughly in the center lane of the policy mainstream that even calling him a progressive may be something of an overstatement.
Republicans, on
