HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS when you ask a bunch of Americans at the Democratic National Convention what they think about Tim Walz.
People get animated. They tilt their heads and they say things like ‘good guy’ and ‘authentic’ and ‘such a dad’. They relax their shoulders.
And then you ask whether they had heard of him a month ago, before he entered the conversation as a potential vice president for the country.
‘No. No, I had not.’ ‘No ma’am, he was not on my radar at all.’ ‘No.’ ‘No’. ‘No.’
In just a matter of days, Tim Walz has managed to come from political anonymity to make Democrats feel not just like they know him, but that they really, really like him.
‘He is like that really good neighbour who would do anything for anyone,’ one delegate tells The Journal.
“Whatever you think of him is exactly who he is,” one Irish-American congressman said. “He’s incredibly smart, incredibly dedicated.”
Barack Obama got a huge round of applause when he described Walz as ‘authentic’ in his speech to the convention last night. ‘His flannel shirts didn’t come from a political consultancy,’ Obama told the crowd.
How did Walz do this? Why do people feel like they know him already, even though they had literally never heard of him a few days ago? How did he pull off what so many politicians have tried – and failed – to do?
In his first big national address since he was selected as Kamala Harris’s vice president pick on 6 August, Walz spoke almost entirely about his personal story, introducing himself to the country – and showing that while he may come across as a typical dad, teacher, and football coach, there are ripples and vulnerabilities to his story too.
At the centre of his speech last night was the story about what he and his wife went through in order to have their two children. Speaking about how he had approved laws as governor of Minnesota to protect IVF treatments, which have been threatened by some Republican politicians, Walz said that ‘this is personal’ for him.
“If you’ve never experienced the hell that is infertility, I guarantee you, you know somebody who has, and I can remember praying each night for a phone call, the pit in your stomach when the phone would ring, and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked,” he said.
“It took Gwen [his wife] and I years, but we had access to fertility treatments and when our daughter was born [in 2001], we named her Hope.”
Walz’s daughter and his son, Gus, who was born five years after Hope, cried in the audience as he spoke.
Walz repeatedly invoked his family as being central to his values, echoing other Democrats throughout this convention who have sought to position their party – rather than Republicans – as being the modern-day party of family values.
He told the huge crowd about how he owns and uses guns, but believes that it’s more important to protect children than to pander to the rights of gun owners.
“Look, I know guns,” he said. “I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter, and I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress and I got the trophies to prove it.
“But I’m also a dad. I believe in the Second Amendment. But I also believe our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.”
He described his childhood in a small town in Nebraska with 400 people in it as being what shaped his belief in community, and said he was inspired by the school football team that he coached to run for Congress.
“So there I was, a 40-something high school teacher with little kids, zero political experience and no money running in a deep red [Republican] district. But you know what? Never underestimate a public school teacher,” he said, to applause from the audience.
The football team is central to Walz’s lore. The team was doing badly before he took over; he made them state champions. Right before he came out to speak, the team – now in their 30s – came out on stage, wearing their high school jerseys and waving to the crowd. During his speech, delegates in the convention centre held up thousands of vertical banners with Coach Walz written on them.
It’s a cinematic narrative: the decent guy who always seemed to do the right thing and lift people around him up. The coach, the dad, the neighbour. The guy who might just get the magic ending.
His comments about family values were echoed by others speakers throughout day three of the four-day national convention, including by Pete Buttigieg, the media-savvy and popular Secretary of Transportation.
Buttigieg, who is gay, spoke about how his own family life is both mundane and extraordinary, describing dinner time at his house with his two toddlers “when the dog is barking and the air fryer is beeping and the mac and cheese is boiling over.”
“It’s the part of our day when politics seems the most distant, and yet the makeup of our kitchen table, the existence of my family, is just one example of something that was literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago.”
Buttigieg said that his “kind of life went from impossible, to possible; from possible to real; from real to almost ordinary, in less than half a lifetime.”
Having Walz and Buttigieg put their families front and centre is a vulnerable thing for politicians to do, leaving them open to attack.
But it’s also effective. The two got the biggest reactions from the crowd over the course of the five-hour event – beaten only by Oprah Winfrey, who made a surprise appearance at the conference.
Delegates seem to have embraced this new policy-light narrative-heavy version of the Democrats.
“I know I don’t actually know him [Walz] – but I kind of do,” said Elaine, a lawyer from California. “I know exactly what type of person he is. And I think we all do, really.”
Christine Bohan is at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago all this week. You can read her articles here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say