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- 🌊 The Viral VP: What Does Tim Walz Believe?
🌊 The Viral VP: What Does Tim Walz Believe?
Plus: How Walz handled the riots in Minneapolis
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On July 24, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz went on MSNBC.
“These are weird people on the other side,” he told Jen Psaki, the MSNBC host and former Biden press secretary.
“They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to. I don’t get sugarcoating this: These are weird ideas.”
The clip went viral and Kamala Harris soon had a talking point: ”Republicans are weird.”
Walz, meanwhile, soon had a new job: Running mate.
Walz (pronounced “Walls,” not “Waltz”) was born in a Nebraska town of 3,500 people to an activist mother and school superintendent father. He moved between rural communities as a child and graduated from a high school in Butte, Nebraska, population 300, where his graduating class had 25 students.
Inspired by his father, a Korean War veteran, Walz joined the Army National Guard at 17. He then attended a Nebraska college and spent a year teaching English in China, sparking an interest in the country that hasn’t faded: Walz speaks Chinese, set up an exchange program for Americans to visit China, and has visited China dozens of times. He and his wife intentionally married on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre – “He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” his wife said – and honeymooned in China.
Walz met his wife while teaching with her at a Nebraska high school, where he also coached football. He lost that role on a Saturday night in 1995, though, after getting a DUI while going 96 in a 55-mph zone.
Walz later claimed while running for Congress that he wasn’t drunk but misheard the officer because of artillery-induced hearing problems. In 2018, he walked this back and admitted that he was drunk.
Walz and his wife later moved to her rural Minnesota hometown, where he resumed coaching football as a politically-minded public school geography teacher. He volunteered on the John Kerry campaign in 2004, took his class to see a George W. Bush rally, and chaired his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. In 2006, he decided to enter politics himself, running for Congress in a rural district that a Republican had won in six consecutive elections.
Before entering Congress, Walz achieved the rank of Command Sergeant Major – the highest rank an enlisted Guardsman can reach. He left the National Guard in 2005, just before he ran, and the circumstances in which he did so are now a controversy.
In 2018, two Guardsmen who served with Walz accused him of “conveniently retiring a year before his battalion was deployed to Iraq.” Another one said, “Nobody wants to go to war. I didn’t want to go, but I went…The big frustration was that he let his troops down.” J.D. Vance, who served in Iraq as a Marine, has accused Walz of “stolen valor.”
Yet Walz retired in May 2005 – two months before his unit was notified it would be deployed to Iraq – and another Guardsman who served with Walz said Walz decided to retire after “a very long conversation behind closed doors…He was trying to decide where he could do better for soldiers, for veterans, for the country. He weighed that for a long time.”
Walz ended up winning six consecutive terms, including in 2016, when his district went for Trump. By the end of his tenure, GovTrack – which tracks Congress members’ ideology based on the bills they sponsor – ranked him the 12th “most politically right” House Democrat. (In 2019, it ranked Kamala Harris the most liberal senator.) Walz, an avid hunter, also received an “A” rating from the NRA.
Around 2017, though, that started to change. He returned NRA donations, tacked left on various issues, and prepared a run for governor. He won that in 2018, paving the way for him to become one of the country’s progressive leaders.
So what policies did he pass? The next segment will cover that.
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