You Can't Cancel Tim Walz's Radicalism With Camo Hats or Ice Fishing!

Tim Graham on Aug 9, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her Democratic running mate, offering a balance of different races and genders -- if you're one of those traditionalists who still believes in those binaries. But their ideology is a pretty strong match. Walz is especially "progressive" on abortion on demand, on pushing "gender-affirming care" for kids and on fawning over illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded benefits like free college tuition.

They'll claim Walz represents "Midwestern values," and then you see he supported tampon machines in male bathrooms in public schools, and he couldn't oppose the idea that pedophilia can be blurred into a list of sexual orientations.

So one of the most bizarre left-wing media spins is the claim that Walz the Libertine Leftist can still appeal to rural conservative voters -- even if there's little evidence he did that in his last governor's race in 2022.

On CBS, Gayle King gushed, "There's something appealing about a guy ... [who] is as comfortable talking in a T-shirt and a baseball cap as he is talking in a suit, as he is talking in a tuxedo." King nudged Robert Costa for more: Walz seems like an amiable fellow, "he can crack a joke, talks about the hot dish up in Minnesota, that famous casserole, can talk about fishing."

On MSNBC, Molly Jong-Fast tried to counter Walz's radicalism with Midwestern practices: "He ice fishes. He's a hunter. He does butter carving. ... He's a rural person." This tends to clash with Walz's biography, teaching high school in Mankato, Minnesota. "In 1999, Walz agreed to be the faculty advisor of Mankato West High School's first gay-straight alliance."

Mankato has a population of about 44,000 people. That's not "rural." That's almost a big city when you grow up in a small town in dairy-farmer country in Wisconsin as I did. You can't cancel out a left-wing record with what you wear or what you eat. Like Jim Hightower, the Texas leftist who wears a cowboy hat. The hat is just a hat. The same goes for the Midwest. You can be a butter-carving socialist. You can be a bratwurst-noshing Marxist. You could even be a drag queen who ice fishes. Where do they come up with this kind of lame spin?

It happened again on the front of the Aug. 8 New York Times. Their headline was "Extraordinarily Ordinary: Walz's Path to Prominence." The subhead was "A Swing-State Plan, Clad in Plain Talk and Carhartt." Here we go again -- he's somehow not a left-wing radical if he wears those working-class Carhartt pants and camouflage hats.

New York Times reporter Lisa Lerer -- author of a new book decrying the repeal of abortion on demand -- gushed that Democrats hope "Brat summer, the lime-green pop-culture meme for Ms. Harris's campaign, can translate into the kind of brat summer that evokes a staple of Midwestern barbecues." Keep hope alive!

Lerer acknowledged Walz was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and that Republicans won't let Walz's "casual style and folksy, flat Midwestern vowels alone pass for moderate views." And why should they? When Trump picked Mike Pence, no one hoped "folksy" vibes and casual styles and casseroles were going to crowd out their dire warnings about the Christian conservatism that terrifies them.

It was a New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, who proclaimed that the election of Trump-Pence in 2016 was a "moral 9/11." Now it's the Times that aerobically implies the election of Harris-Walz is a victory for a working-class "politics of joy." That's not news. It's advertising.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.