America’s Midwestern Dad?

Every Minnesotan has known a Tim Walz or two in his lifetime. Or more.

He’s the indistinguishable smiling chub in your dad’s old hunting photos. Or the guy who was the manager of the meat department at the grocery store. Or the guy in cargo shorts and a polo shirt and white sneakers (black socks, optional) at the hardware store on Saturday, chatting with the clerks about the price of propane. Or the governor. Or the guy in the local paper opening the new car dealership. Or being arrested for skimming from the old car dealership. We’ve been turning out Walzs up here for years. Guys who go from 30 to 50 overnight and stay there.

Our basic take, as Minnesotans: Probably a good neighbor, as these things go—you could borrow a bag of briquets from him if your cookout hit a snag. If he did the same, he’d pay you back. If he got up earlier than you after a snowfall, he might shovel your front walk. (Driveway’s up to you.) At the neighborhood block party, you talk about crime in vague, nonspecific terms while the wives talk about the kids. When they downsized and moved to Arizona, you’d say you should get together before they go, but you don’t, and you don’t miss them that much.

The stories in the news talk about Walz’s “big dad energy!” Yay patriarchy, apparently. His legions of new fans describe his grounded Midwestern appeal, sensible and practical like the rest of the denizens of the great flat lands. The stories about his days as a high school teacher paint a picture of a man whose students liked him, a lot, and how he was a great teacher. No reason to doubt that.

And it doesn’t mean anything, anyway. I loved my teachers, too, but then years later you see their name attached to a letter in the paper yelling at Ronnie Raygun for being mean to the Sandinistas. Ohhhhkay well, I’ll just remember the good times, when he was failing me at chemistry. 

In an election about specific, important issues, positions matter. In a “vibe election,” when it’s all about memes and TikTok clapbacks and Brat Summer, a smiling Midwesterner is a reassurance, as if they nominated someone from a Rockwell painting. Twitter was full of gushing Gov-love along these lines:

“He’s the kind of guy who’d stop if you were out of gas and give you some of his own!”

Yeah, probably so! But his energy policies, from pipeline cancellation to carbon-free mandates, are anti-gas, will hike prices and lead to brownouts in the wintertime. And that electric vehicle he wants everyone to drive is going to drain like crazy in the winter up here. Seems to me, anyway.

“J.D. Vance would just drive by!”

Okay nice talkin’ with ya, you take it easy there.

Walz is less popular in rural Minnesota, the place from which he supposedly derives his genial character. To those folks, the trans stuff is—well, weird. When he talks about the conservatives banning books, either he doesn’t know the parents are unhappy with sex-manual comic books in middle school ... or he does know and he’s fibbing? They’re still mad at him for the COVID lockdowns. Again, a classic Midwestern story: The guy you meet at the one town diner every morning for coffee and donuts shows another side when war is declared and he’s appointed blackout monitor. Tim, the Japanese aren’t going to drop bombs on Wadena.

“I have a job to do and I’m going to do it. Your shade is an inch above the sill. All the way down, Harvey. Don’t make me write you up."

Here’s the thing about that beaming image of solidity and sincerity: It’s true, but it isn’t. And that’s okay. We have something up here called Minnesota Nice, usually mentioned by people who think it’s anything but, and regard it as a form of passive-aggressive standoffishness. Often, that’s so. Sometimes, it’s not. We are nice, but while it’s sometimes insincere, it’s sincerely insincere. We have agreed that things work better if everyone gets along in a civil fashion, and society is not full of elbows and barbs. We may not like the people with whom we are dealing, but we sincerely believe we should pretend that we do. After all, a farmer who lives 30 miles from the next farmhouse might need his neighbor’s help some day, and you want to be on good terms, even if he is a blowhard who sits there at the VFW on fish-fry night and makes it sound as if he held off the Chinese on Hamburger Hill all by himself.

If Walz should become vice president, even the detractors will have some pride that a local guy brought some Minnesota flavor to the White House.

And if he loses? Well, that’s not really about us. Guy was born in Nebraska, you know. More Husker than Gopher. You could always tell.