Tim Walz and the ‘Folksy’ Science Behind Sounding All-American

If you created a word cloud from all Tim Walz ’s interviews over the last few weeks, the word ‘weird’ would be featured prominently, as would ‘football,’ ‘Minnesota,’ and maybe ‘white guy tacos.’ But one word above all would stand out among the vice presidential candidate's vernacular: ‘folksy.’

Walz’s supporters use that term: A tweet from screenwriter Adam Best praising the native-Nebraskan’s “organic, folksy, straightforward vibe,” for example, got 25,000 likes. His detractors use it, too. Glenn Beck railed against the idea that he was the “most folksy dad ever.”

The descriptor may seem spontaneous. But like ‘aw-shucks’ with Reagan and ‘malarkey’ with Biden, such phrases—and their intention—are not entirely off-the-cuff. They are part of a concentrated effort, going back to Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, to create an American brand of English.

A love for plain-spokenness (or straightforward, relatable language unburdened by Old World flourish and high-mindedness) has helped America’s heartland hub, Indiana, become the second most-popular source of vice presidents after New York. It’s why Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, and Texas have all produced multiple veeps—in the latter case, presidents too. It's why Walz’s home state, Minnesota, has produced two of the last five Democratic heartbeats-away from the Oval Office (Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey).

So as Coach Walz prepares to deliver his biggest “clear eyes, full hearts” pep talk yet at the 2024 Democratic National Convention this evening, here are four proven secrets to sounding all-American to look out for:

Live by the golden rule: use lots of golden rules.

Through his alter ego Poor Richard, Franklin became the bespectacled inventor of American rhetoric by sprinkling his speeches with an endless kite-string of maxims, witticisms and wordplays. His most quoted aphorisms all reinforced the same aspirational point: Your success is determined by who you are.

America’s top values, in Franklin construct, are industry (“Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”) and frugality (“A fat kitchen makes a lean will”); the ones you should most avoid are idleness (“Laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes it”) and extravagance (“Waste neither time nor money”). Crucially, all of these hallmarks reinforce the same point: Our chief virtue is virtue.

With this in mind, it’s no wonder that one of Walz’s biggest applause lines is to ‘Follow the golden rule: Mind your own damn business.” Will he unveil another tonight?

Deliver us from opera.

Perhaps the single greatest influencer on American linguistics has been Dale Carnegie, the son of a Midwest hog farmer who was so humiliated by having to ride a horse to and from school that he channeled his insecurity into a global empire to teach Americans to be better speakers.

The chief guru of 19 ^th century rhetoric, French opera teacher Francois Delsarte, had stressed flowery gesture and ornate dynamics known as harmonic gymnastics. Carnegie, writing in the personality driven 1920s, stressed the opposite, promoting what he called natural delivery . One should speak slowly—“We need not shout nor strain the voice, but we can use our every-day conversational tone,” for example, and connect spoken words with emotions.

Walz’s high-energy repetition of engaging, evocative terms like ‘joy’ and ‘neighbor,’ ‘forward’ and ‘future’ are straight out of the Carnegie playbook. They may be grounded in policy and ideology, but they are delivered in a way to make friends and influence voters.

Plain and simple.

Karen Schriver, a PhD in rhetoric who now runs her own communications firm, has long studied the growth of the plain language movement. (She serves as an American representative at the International Plain Language Federation .) Her primary conclusion is that the most effective language is easy to understand. “Plain language is often viewed as a quaint idea,” she writes, but “the growing empirical evidence suggests that plain language works for everyone.”

How did Walz stick the landing with the largest rhetorical trick of the summer? Because ‘weird,’ a word linked to the Roman fates and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, has also become the staple of Hollywood classics like Back to the Future and Pirates of the Caribbean. It was Marty McFly, after all, who said of his foray into a strange new world, “I don’t know, but something weird is going on.”

It’s hard to imagine a repeat mention of ‘weird’ won’t elicit one of the heartiest responses of the night especially after even Michelle Obama dropped her self-imposed cap on Democratic rhetoric.

Play with your face.

The great American rhetoricians play with their face. Bill Clinton bit his lower lip. Barack Obama , before delivering his wry observation that no one calls the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” anymore now that it's popular during his DNC speech, performed a signature move borrowed from Johnny Carson, swiping his nose. Reagan’s cock of his head before delivering a zinger was also artfully mimicked by Michelle Obama last night, immediately after her “Black jobs” jab.

Walz has a similar tell. Before delivering a big line, he tugs at his right ear—seemingly a callback to Carol Burnett, who tugged her left earlobe in tribute to the grandmother that raised her. Such gestures are designed to say, ‘See, I’m just like you. My hand may be in the cookie jar, but I’m just as surprised as you.”

Indeed, if all these Americanisms aren’t enough, Walz, whose entrance song is John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” can always rely on his children . This week, they mimicked bunny ears behind his head on national television.

Now that’s folksy.

Bruce Feiler is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast . He’s the author Life Is in the Transitions and Secrets of Happy Families and writes the popular newsletter, The Nonlinear Life .

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