Nobody Else Wanted It. That’s Why It’s Walz.
The pick is in, and it’s…underwhelming.
Multiple reports Tuesday morning indicated Kamala Harris has personally chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her vice presidential running mate for the White House in 2024.
She will introduce the Midwestern governor, former U.S. Army non-commissioned officer, and union supporter at a rally Tuesday evening in Philadelphia. Then they will begin a tour of key battleground states.
The Harris campaign had reportedly planned to make the announcement via video message before the rally, though the exact timing remained unclear, according to AP.
It appears many Democrats are waiting for the campaign’s official announcement before offering their observations on the choice.
Last month the 60-year-old announced his support for Harris a day after President Joe Biden ended his candidacy despite being the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, as Breitbart News reported.
Walz, the 41st governor of Minnesota since 2019, simply put out a tweet indicating he had spoken with Harris in the wake of Biden’s departure from the ticket and that she had landed his support.
Tim Walz, the leftist imbecile who did nothing as George Floyd rioters burned Minneapolis to cinders following one of the most overhyped and off-the-rails police controversies in American history (Floyd, a career criminal who’d had the cops called on him for passing bad paper, took three times the fatal dose of fentanyl and was a goner long before the Minneapolis PD came to take him away; he was pinned to the ground because he was too high to submit to an arrest and it was the fentanyl, not Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on his upper torso, which killed him), is a signally terrible choice for Kamala Harris’ VP.
He’s a white guy who served in the Army National Guard, but that doesn’t make him a “moderate” or a “centrist.” Walz is an out-and-out Marxist of the Bernie Sanders stripe, a member of Pramila Jayapal’s House “Progressive” Caucus when he was a congressman from 2009-2018, and a hardcore left-wing governor of Minnesota who, when he wasn’t shepherding Minneapolis into status as a dead city following the George Floyd riots, has led the league in promoting transgenderism – so much so that he’s declared Minnesota a “trans sanctuary” as other states have put an end to pediatric sex-change operations.
He’s the perfect VP choice – for Republicans to run against.
And nobody has a clue who he is. He doesn’t help Harris’ ticket outside of Minnesota – and if she needs help in Minnesota, of all places, she has no chance to win. You can’t sell him as a centrist. All he brings to the table is that he’s white and he’s old.
So why is he the nominee? Well, that’s simple.
Nobody else would take the job.
Let’s remember that both Gretchen Whitmer and Roy Cooper, the governors of Michigan and North Carolina, states Harris really does need help to win, publicly withdrew from VP consideration. That was a pretty conspicuous thing for them to do; what’s preferable would be to quietly decline and say nothing and let someone else get it. Instead, both went public.
Mark Kelly fell off the radar despite the fact Barack Obama, who ultimately is the guy in charge of the Democrat Party, actually wanted him as the nominee for president, much less for VP. Kelly turns out to have a big investment in a Chinese balloon company which makes products akin to those spy balloons they’ve been flying over our territory; if you want to survive the public’s reaction to that it’s better to do it in a presidential primary than the sprint of a general election when you’re the #2 on the ticket and can’t get the spotlight to explain it away. Besides, Kelly would have his eye on 2028 when he might run for the top job.
You wouldn’t pick Tim Walz over Mark Kelly. Under no theory of politics is the former a better choice than the latter. Kelly pulled out.
And then there is Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor who was most obviously the right choice for Harris. Everyone thought Shapiro would be the choice until a day or so ago.
What’s wrong with Shapiro? He’s Jewish, and even though something like 50 percent of all the campaign donations to Democrat candidates come from Jewish contributors, today’s Democrats are anti-semitic and hate Israel (which Shapiro has strongly supported, at least up until five minutes ago). There was a great deal of pushback against Shapiro from the Hard Left and the Hamas faction in the party, though it shouldn’t have been enough to sink him. Shapiro would make Pennsylvania very winnable for Harris, and she can’t win this race without Pennsylvania. That alone would be more important than any other consideration.
But if you’re Shapiro, you see yourself as the future of the Democrat Party. And as Harris’ VP choice you’re either second-fiddle to someone who would instantly be one of the least popular, least successful presidents in more than a century, which would turn you into a 21st century Walter Mondale, or you’re the #2 on a losing presidential ticket – which is a political death knell.
More than likely, Shapiro had conditions under which he would have taken the nomination and those weren’t met.
There is no political universe in which Tim Walz is a superior choice to Josh Shapiro. This was Shapiro’s choice.
Walz is a vocal, garrulous leftist in the Bernie Sanders mold, and they will trot him out as an anti-Trump attack dog as a means of keeping Harris under wraps as long as they can. The problem is that by locking him in as Harris’ VP this Democrat ticket is radically pro-transgenderism, pro-infanticide, pro-rioting, pro-COVID lockdown, pro-migrant invasion and pro-climate nuttery. It offers absolutely nothing in the way of a middle ground non-ideological voters can hang their hats on.
All Team Trump has to do is run against woke communism and promise freedom and prosperity. Harris and Walz can’t offer anything else but radical policy, so they won’t talk about policy at all and they’ll simply offer up nonstop character assassination of Trump.
Walz was the one who called J.D. Vance “weird,” and started that dumb meme which didn’t really take off and in fact backfired when people started posting pictures of blue-haired feminists and transpeople and other “counterculture” figures and sarcastically agreed that Vance was a weirdo. That’s what this campaign will devolve into and it isn’t going to be well-rewarded by the voters.
Harris went into the free agent market or the transfer portal, or whatever other sports analogy you like, and mostly came up empty. She now has a VP candidate who is a drag on her ticket – while she herself is a drag on it, as evidenced by the fact she’s spent more than two weeks as the Democrats’ putative/official nominee and can’t even sit for questions from reporters.
Despite anything else you might hear about Walz, what you see this morning is Harris settling for what she can get. It’s not a good day for her campaign.