In 1994 Tim Walz moved to Mankato, Minnesota, where he taught geography and coached the local high school football team. Whatever can be said about his tenure in Congress or as governor, there is only one metric for success when it comes to a football coach: winning. In 1999, he coached his team to its first state championship.
Tim Walz’s time as a high school coach is important not because it qualifies him to be president, however much Democrats are likely to try to conflate that aspect of his personal biography with the characteristics necessary to lead a country. It does, however, give us insight into how he views the world. It fills in the piece that will be missing from the attacks on Walz’s record that are already emerging from Republican sources.
Without a doubt, Tim Walz has done extremely left-wing things and is arguably one of the most left-wing governors in America. It will also be incomplete to merely attack him as the down-the-line leftist who mismanaged the George Floyd riots, stripped parental rights from those who disapproved of youth gender transitions, and a host of other left-wing social priorities.
The claim that merely because Tim Walz has done left-wing things he is a left-wing extremist will be hard to sustain in the face of his all-American biography, which is the reason Democrats are going to push it so hard. For example, where and when did Walz meet the neo-Marxist hot house of U.S. higher education, or encounter the DEI groupthink of coastal urban America? If Tim Walz developed a left-wing intellectual worldview, it is unclear how and when he did so. Worse, any effort to prove the point will see its proponents delving into what can only be described as conspiracy theories.
That is because Walz is not an ideological extremist, but a partisan one.
Walz does not seem to have had deep views about ideology before his first campaign. He decided to run for office after confronting his incumbent Republican congressman over the latter’s support of the Iraq War, and ever since he has appeared to have understood politics not in terms of policy, but rather, friend/foe distinctions.
Those who are on his side are “good.” Those on the other are “evil.” It is as if he still views the world through the lens of the successful high school football coach he was before entering politics – an outlook that sees politics in terms of advancing his side down the field and scoring touchdowns. It does not matter if a policy is “good” or “bad.” If it is a Democratic or liberal policy, then advancing it is his job, and enacting it into law is a touchdown.
A football coach does not ask why his team is trying to reach the other end of the field. The end-zone is that way, and the enemy is between his players and where he needs them to go. His only job is to figure out how to get them there, and to prevent the enemy from getting in the way.
Other governors, even liberal ones such as Gavin Newsom, appear to have had priorities, eccentric issues on which they were focused. Walz has only had one goal as governor: to rack up the score. He signed everything that came to him from the Democratic legislature. Even Gavin Newsom vetoed a law that would have stripped custody from parents who opposed their children’s gender transition. It is doubtful Walz even read a similar bill that he signed into law in his state. It was enough to know that Democrats supported it and Republicans opposed it.
This attitude is why the George Floyd situation so confused Walz. For someone without any innate sense of right or wrong, Walz was lost without clear partisan guideposts. Liberals and Democrats demanded that the “evil” police be punished and insisted that “racism was a public health concern,” so he let them riot. Democratic donors and elites then screamed about the property destruction, so he sent in the National Guard. They then called for a national reckoning over alleged “systemic racism,” so he took bent the knee to the activists.
A man who had core values of his own would have assumed leadership and imposed order on the chaos enabled by a schizophrenic Democratic Party. Walz instead reflected that schizophrenia, veering from one policy extreme to the other, turning a tragic situation into a cataclysmic one.
America would be harmed by a president suspicious of Israel for intellectual or personal reasons. America cannot be effectively led by a man whose instinct when faced with a crisis is to poll the Democratic congressional caucuses, DNC, and major donor chats.
Yet that is exactly the sort of man whom the Democratic Party elites intend to force onto the country in Walz. It is easy to see why. The American people and the world as a whole may lose from that approach to governance. But the Democratic congressional caucuses, DNC, and major donors stand to gain everything from a vice president or even president who believes his job is to do nothing more than aggregate the views of party elites into action.
It has become apparent over the past few weeks that the removal of Joe Biden represents something momentous in the development of not just the Democratic Party, but of American government itself. Some of those who set out to remove Joe Biden may have merely been motivated by the desire to avert a certain loss in November, but it has become obvious that many have begun to aim higher.
The Democratic Party has been a semi-monarchical organ since Bill Clinton’s presidency, as demonstrated by the willingness of leading politicians to debase themselves in defending his every affair. After the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the “throne” was vacant, and this allowed Pelosi, Schumer, and a host of politicians to set up what in effect was a collective leadership.
Biden has made half-hearted efforts to restore the primacy of the presidency, but the nature of his nomination and his own mental decline rendered these futile. His removal, however, has replaced him not with Kamala, but with a junta of which she is merely the symbolic face. Pelosi, who openly took credit for forcing Biden from the ticket, now revels in her role in blocking Shapiro in favor of Walz. The junta likes an empty throne, and wish to extend their power beyond this November.
Walz, then, is not a defensive move, nor a step to prop up Harris’s authority. He is a demonstration that she has no authority, and that Walz, not Harris, is the future of the party. Harris will serve the elite’s purposes for now, as she was at the right place at the right time.
Walz, however, is their vision of an ideal president. Not a master, but a servant. They view him precisely the way the board members of an elite boarding school would view their headmaster – an individual whose job it is to transform their desires into reality, improve the brand, and understand that he is an employee, but they are the owners.
Walz in their eyes will represent a new type of president – a president responsible to the Democratic Party, not the American people. After all, why not? It was the party leaders, not the voters, who hired him.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
