[[link removed]]

HUMPHREY WITHOUT VIETNAM, BUT MORE DOWN-HOME  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
August 6, 2024
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Tim Walz, in the best Minnesota traditions _

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz applauds as President Joe Biden speaks at
Dutch Creek Farms in Northfield, Minnesota, November 1, 2023., Andrew
Harnik/AP Photo

 

Rural roots. High school social studies teacher. As coach, turned
around losing high school football team and led it to state
championship. Twenty-four years’ service in the state’s National
Guard. Gun owner; hunts pheasants. As congressman, won historically
Republican district six times. As governor, worked with the
legislature and signed into law universal free breakfast and lunch
program for public school students, paid sick and family leave,
groundbreaking sectoral bargaining for nursing home employees, and
first-in-the-nation outlawing of employers’ common practice of
compelling employees to attend anti-union rants—all with just a
one-vote majority in the state Senate. Coined a devastating (because
accurate and simple) meme to describe Donald Trump & Co.

If you’re a Democrat who understands the need to win back some of
the rural and working-class voters who’ve moved right, not to
mention the need to enact major progressive populist, pro-worker, and
pro-choice legislation, what’s not to like about Tim Walz?

Kamala Harris’s decision
[[link removed]]
earlier today
[[link removed]]
to pick the Minnesota governor as her running mate was anything but
devoid of political smarts. To be sure, picking Josh Shapiro would
likely have helped in the must-win state of Pennsylvania, but it might
also have guaranteed the kind of heckling from those opposed to
Israel’s war on Gaza (only some of whom are anti-Israel and only
some of them are antisemitic, too) that had been guaranteed at all of
Joe Biden’s campaign events. That would have stepped on the story of
Harris’s attacks on Trump’s past, present, and future. Besides
which, when you consider Walz on his own merits, he’s both
programmatically and politically the candidate from central casting.

The _Prospect _has been chronicling the course of Minnesota’s
progressivism and its leaders for a long time. In 2002, I covered Paul
Wellstone’s last campaign
[[link removed]] just a few weeks
before he was killed in a plane crash. In 2014, I covered the
emergence of a labor-community coalition
[[link removed]] in the Twin
Cities that knitted together service, retail, and construction unions
with immigrant, civil rights, environmental, and pro-choice groups.

The goals of that coalition had to be put on hold for nearly a decade,
however, as Republican control of one house of the state legislature
continually thwarted their proposals. In 2022, however, not only was
Walz re-elected as governor but the Democrats were able to cling to
their narrow majority in the lower house and win a one-vote majority
in the state Senate. Whereupon, as my colleague Ryan Cooper noted
[[link removed]] last
year, the legislature passed and Walz signed into law new statutes
that created paid sick days for nearly all workers, which will accrue
at the rate of one hour per 30 hours worked up to a maximum of 48
hours; forbids noncompete agreements in labor contracts; establishes a
sectoral bargaining system for nursing homes; allows teachers to
negotiate class sizes; and bans “captive audience” meetings where
employers force their workers to listen to anti-union propaganda. It
also sets up new protections for meatpackers, construction workers,
and Amazon employees. And a separate bill passed on Sunday guarantees
a minimum wage
[[link removed]]
for Uber and Lyft drivers.

In other words, second-term Walz had a first hundred days almost
comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933.

Walz deserves huge credit for this—no other Democratic governor can
claim a comparable level of success, much less with a one-vote
majority in a legislative house—but so does the entire and very
disparate Minnesota left, which had stuck together and worked together
for nearly a full decade in preparation for such a day. Biden could
have used that kind of unified push in his unsuccessful fight to enact
his Build Back Better bill and the PRO Act, which would have
effectively resurrected a pro-worker National Labor Relations Act.
Walz, to be sure, wasn’t subjected to the same legislative
roadblocks—the filibuster and Sens. Manchin and Sinema—that
derailed Biden’s proposals.

That said, Walz is still one hell of a veepick. In the best traditions
of Minnesota’s progressive populism. Humphrey without Vietnam, but
more down-home.

===

* Tim Walz
[[link removed]]
* Kamala Harris
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]