How Tim Walz Learned To Throw a Punch

CHICAGO — Democrats let loose with roars Wednesday evening for the version of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz that they have come to know over the past month: The new favorite mascot of progressives, the guy who lands a stinging partisan punch, the flannel-shirted happy warrior from the heartland.

Listening to his lines, and the thundering applause they summoned, my mind went back to a different version of Walz I experienced not very long ago.

It was the summer of 2020 — in the middle of the pandemic, just a couple months after George Floyd’s murder on a Minneapolis street corner prompted a convulsive national reckoning over race — and we were seated outside for a properly distanced interview on the patio of the governor’s residence in St. Paul.

In the conversation, Walz offered a confession of sorts: Even his wife, fellow teacher Gwen Walz, worried that his affable manner and instinct for centrist compromise could lead Republicans to regard him as a pushover.

“She’s a little more, ‘They mistake your kindness for weakness and don’t ever do that,’” Walz told me .

That comment wasn’t especially surprising. Though I don’t know Walz well, a handful of encounters over the years left a distinct impression. We first spoke in 2006, when he was running for an uphill but ultimately successful campaign to win a Republican-held congressional district, and his message was decidedly centrist. Even by 2020, he was professing his desire for bipartisan bridge-building.

Now, in 2024, the Democratic vice presidential nominee has emphatically solved the pushover problem. The man who rose to power in Minnesota as a pleasant, sensible, stolid politician — emblematic of a state with a pleasant, sensible, stolid political culture — has emerged as an improbably effective performer and pugilist.

What happened?

Probably Walz always had a more theatrical bent — the ham at the head of the classroom — than was sensible for an aspiring Democrat who came from a conservative part of his state to put on full display. Likely he always harbored private views that were to the left of his safe and steady public persona.

Even so, Walz’s politics have plainly been in migration over the years — in ways that illuminate some important features of modern politics.

One part of the migration relates to Minnesota. The state used to have a distinct sense of regional place — including a civic culture fashioned by Scandinavian and other northern European immigrants who prized clean, orderly public-spirited politics. Increasingly, the state is like every other place, with national trends smothering local folkways. As the state legislature became more like Washington — marked by crude and inflexible partisanship — Walz’s policy profile became steadily that of an unapologetic progressive.

Another notable lesson of Walz’s career is that political reputations are more malleable in a modern media environment than people suppose.

Polarized politics, according to one common view, means that officeholders have scant room for maneuver. Voters demand to know on which side of all the familiar ideological and cultural chasms a candidate stands — no deviations allowed.

But Walz suggests that a politician with the right sort of personality has plenty of room for maneuver.

One reason that Vice President Kamala Harris hopes Walz will be a potent addition to her ticket is his gift for articulating Democratic orthodoxy — support for abortion rights, an expanded social safety net, gun control — in everyday language that sounds commonsensical and neighborly.

No, Walz would not have successfully run on such an outspoken platform when he first ran for Congress from his home base in Mankato in 2006. But nor did it sound on Wednesday like he had forsaken his roots as he lustily advocated all these positions.

“We also protected reproductive freedom, because in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make,” Walz boasted. “And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

Turning to gun control, he backed it not from the usual perspective as an urban liberal but that of small-town everyman: “Look, I know guns. I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter. And I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress, and I’ve 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.”

Republicans aren’t going to let Walz’s migration from rural centrist to national progressive go unassailed. But there is an example from Walz’s home state that shows how an arresting personality can expand his political appeal.

When I first knew Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota senator who died in a plane crash in 2002, the notion of him as a figure with potential statewide appeal — never mind a national profile — would have been laughable. He was a Carleton College political science professor who didn’t regard himself as a liberal so much as a radical activist. He taught Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in class, then tried to act on those principles in protests against military contractors, power companies and meatpackers.

He was elected to the Senate in 1990 against a complacent Republican incumbent on the power of his energetic campaign and quirky, entertaining advertisements. Wellstone, too, wore flannel shirts and talked and presented himself as a big-hearted, small-town progressive. There was no doubt that he was far more leftist than the electorate who sent him to office, and reelected him again in 1996. He stood a decent chance of winning again at the time of his death in a plane crash, running for a third term in opposition to military intervention in Iraq. By the end of his life, Wellstone was encouraging comparisons between himself and famous Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey — never mind that the former vice president was the kind of establishment liberal Wellstone had contempt for as a young man.

My colleague Paul Demko notes that Walz began his political career by attending Camp Wellstone, a political training camp, that was started by David Wellstone after his father’s death.

Paul Wellstone used the power of personality to smooth his transition from leftist outsider to mainstream politician. Walz is hoping to use the power of personality to smooth the transition from centrist to progressive cheerleader for Harris.

He’s also hoping to follow the same path as Humphrey, the original Happy Warrior, to the vice presidency, under Lyndon B. Johnson. That was 60 years ago. The roars Walz generated at his speech here suggest that Democrats are ready once again for a political innovator from Minnesota.