Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said one reason he was chosen as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the recent election was because he could “code talk to white guys watching football” and “fixing their truck.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said one reason he was chosen as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the recent election was because he could “code talk to white guys watching football” and “fixing their truck.”
Democrat’s use of the vice president to “balance the ticket” is what got us here. Everyone forgets that the entire reason that Biden was Obama’s VP was that there was trepidation at having a black candidate, so to balance the ticket, they looked for the most racist white guy still in the Democratic party, which was Biden. Biden’s staffers were pulling their hair out and complaining in the 2020 primary, saying things like “please, use any other examples of reaching across the aisle to work with Republicans, other than how much you loved Strom Thurmand and worked with him to stop desegregation”. The calculus with Walz was that you get a “bumbling Midwest guy” on the ticket and they can continue to take progressive voters for granted and possibly appeal to purple states, since several of them were Midwestern.
I see 3 main reasons she lost and none of them have really anything to do with Walz.
Walz was put in a box and hidden the moment Biden stategist were hired. He literally was nowhere seen after a first week until the debate (which was a total failure as he was forced to repeat her horrible positions) and then last week. He was chosen before Biden stategists joined who hated his guts since they literally fought all their miserable lives against working class policies he supports. They wanted Shapiro.
Source: https://jacobin.com/2024/08/josh-shapiro-israel-palestine-vice-president
I remember that the week they picked Walz was the one week where we all thought that the Dems could actually run a competent campaign. People were calling Republicans “wierd”, Kamala no-showed a Netanyahu Senate visit, Walz was and still is genuinely popular - there was a lot of hope that she would break with Biden to the point where even cynical people thought she would do it out of pure electoral calculus due to Biden’s unpopularity.
Then
apparently Harris herselfthe Biden staffers they brought on the campaign shut down the “weird” messaging, and she had that blood and soil DNC speech, and we all got brought back to reality.It was Biden strategists not her.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/18/politics/kamala-harris-presidential-campaign/index.html
Oh whoops.
So, she was stupid and naive enough to embrace the most destructive and losing campaign she could have possibly chosen and give up everything that was working? Weird how it is a constant refrain that tacking towards the right is the winning move that all campaign advisors point out, and even though it always loses, Obama was the only Democrat after Bill Clinton to not follow this advice, it is not a damning condemnation that a Dem candidate always listen to this advice, despite its obvious failures. Litterally, Biden could not have won on this playbook (only Democrat since Clinton to win with this) if the combination of COVID and BLM made Trump seem obviously failing, through no virtue of Biden.
No, we should glorify and defend Harris for selling out to the most loosing and useless tactics possible, because being polite and positive is more important that defeating, in her words!, fascism.
It’s hard to pin down what she actually believes in, but if I had to guess she was forced to take those strategists on and their policies to maintain access to the funding that came from Biden.
Even if she didn’t believe in many of the popular policies she mentioned in the early days, I think she had okay instincts, but was too afraid to go against the whole Democratic machine.
Being a strategist is a business and they get paid no matter if they win or lose, so their interest lie in protecting that business model inside the aparatus.
P.S. Nowhere did I defend the Harris or her loosing strategy. I just pointed out factual mistake.
I wasn’t blaming Walz as much as saying that putting Walz on the ticket was, in their eyes, enough of a sop to progressives and midwesterners, that they should be able to give nothing else to those constituencies.