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WILL HARRIS VIBES DELIVER WALZ POLICY?  
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David Sirota
August 9, 2024
The Lever
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_ The Democratic ticket offers vagueness, corporate ties, and now
laudable prairie populism. What will the agenda actually be? _

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her
running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at a campaign rally in
Philadelphia. , AP Photo/Joe Lamberti

 

Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz
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comparisons, memes, and cliches: He’s the Midwestern dad you always
wanted, he’s _Friday Night Lights_’ Coach Taylor
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he’s a fount
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normal-guy aphorisms (as discussed
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recent episode of _Lever Time_
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But to me, Tim Walz is an archetype I first encountered 20 years ago
at an eerily similar political fork in Democrats’ road. His vice
presidential nomination this week once again offers a glimmer of hope
for a new path — even amid warning signs that the party will take
the old path.

In 2004, I helped elect that era’s version of Tim Walz to the
governorship of deep-red Montana. Save for the military service, Brian
Schweitzer was all the adjectives now used to describe Walz —
small-town, blunt, plain-spoken, pragmatic. In an election year
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where Democrats got destroyed up and down the ballot, Schweitzer
pulled off his seemingly impossible victory by being decidedly
populist and normal (read: not _weird_
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As I suggested in _The American Prospect_
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Washington Monthly_
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2004 election, Schweitzer’s cultural signaling gave him wide room to
campaign on economic populism — which he brought
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into
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the
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governor’s office
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At the time, I thought Schweitzer could be the beginning of a new era
of revived prairie populism that had been championed by Democrats like
Byron Dorgan
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Dave Obey
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Andy Jacobs
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Cecil Andrus
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and Paul Wellstone
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But that’s not how things turned out. 

Schweitzer ended up being an anomaly. His politics clashed with
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the ascendant Obama-branded neoliberalism of the post-Bush era, and
his Montana success proved to be more like a last gasp of prairie
populism rather than a revival of it. Obama-ism’s mix of identity
politics, corporatism, and good vibes won out — and the party became
more urban, more coastal, and less populist, while losing lots of
elections
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in the heartland.

Fast forward two decades, and Walz cuts a similar profile as
Schweitzer once did — and now on a bigger stage. In the election
cycle after Schweitzer’s first victory, Walz ran for Congress mixing
cultural signaling as a gun-owning hunter
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economic populism to win a Republican-leaning district. Later as
governor, he and the Democratic-controlled legislature enacted the
“Minnesota Miracle”
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— a laudable record of lite social democracy. As Walz described
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it in Wellstone-esque terms: “One person’s socialism is another
person’s neighborliness.”

Unlike many of his peers, Walz seems to understand the perils of
Democrats’ technocratic politics and obsession with making
everything complex and annoying. When the _New York Times_’ Ezra
Klein recently asked the Minnesota governor why he rejected
Democrats’ obsession with means testing and made a school breakfast
and lunch program universal, Walz reprised
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the best answers I’ve ever heard
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creates cultural boundaries between haves and have nots, buries people
in paperwork, and “ends up then becoming very cumbersome or becomes
inoperable.” 

Walz concluded that same interview by declaring
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that if Democrats win in 2024, their first policy priority should be
giving all Americans paid family and medical leave — a wildly
popular idea
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even among Republicans. Amen to that.

All of this from Walz is encouraging — as is him being rewarded with
the VP nomination. The excitement around his elevation has led some
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to infer Kamala Harris [[link removed]]
will be the populist president Obama refused to be, and some media
outlets
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to insist that Walz proves that Democrats will champion a “care
economy” (a fancy new term for the very old idea of a more robust
social safety net
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But while I’d like to think that’s an inevitability, the rhetoric
seems like wishcasting — or at least premature.

Why? Because Walz is the running mate of Kamala Harris, who has a
squishy
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record
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on economic issues
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has declined
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to outline a clear economic vision, and has surrounded
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herself with her party’s corporate-friendly crowd
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Harris has so far run a solid electoral campaign as a capable generic
Democrat — but the donor class seems to see an opportunity. Some
Democratic billionaires feel
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emboldened
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to demand [[link removed]]
her retreat from the most successful populist politics
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of the Biden administration. Indeed, reporting
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press shows that corporate titans see Walz’s nomination merely as a
rhetorical and aesthetic sop to the party’s base — but not a
signal of Harris’s commitment to adopting Walzonomics or even the
strongest parts of the Biden-Harris economic agenda. 

Maryland’s Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said as much out loud, using a
CNBC appearance to insinuate
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may break with that agenda in order to better serve “our large
industries.”

“Was (Moore) speaking on Harris’s behalf? Does he know something
that Harris has declined to share with the public herself?” wondered
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_The New Yorker_’s Jay Caspian Kang. “(Harris) has not
explained… why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once
said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for All, which she
once supported; or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of
the Federal Trade Commission… The press, it seems, will have to
persist in the thankless task of demanding answers, even if we risk
disrupting the good times.”

The risk goes beyond just messing with the vibes — for smaller media
outlets like _The Lever_, daring to ask about Harris’s policy agenda
risks financial punishment from the “big chunk of the public (that)
no longer believes journalism is about seeking truth or holding power
to account,” as _The Atlantic_ writer (and recent _Lever Time_ guest
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_Tyler Austin Harper put it
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they see the media as a kind of jack-in-the-box that is supposed to
pop up and say ‘Trump is bad!’ over and over… like a kid who
wants to be read the same bedtime story over every night and throws a
fit if you pull a different book off the shelf.” 

Because Harris has not outlined a clear legislative agenda, I don’t
know where she will end up on policy. She has a history of airing
compelling populist economic rhetoric — some of which she’s now
echoing on the campaign
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but also a history of retreating
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or soft-pedaling
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the face of pressure. Our team at _The Lever _is certainly doing our
part to try to find out
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what her actual agenda will be (while also aggressively
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covering
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the Trump-Vance ticket), but I’m not sure anyone will ever get clear
answers in a political environment where even asking questions is
equated with disloyalty. 

That said, I am sure that my feelings this week of déjà vu aren’t
delusions or doomerism. Watching so many observers projecting so much
onto Walz’s nomination reminds me of 2004, when I thought
Schweitzer’s victory could be a sign of a left-of-center populist
future to come — but then it became more like a last blast from a
populist past as neoliberalism took over.

In this new era, I’d love to assume Walz’s admirable prairie
populism will become mainstream Democratic politics — and perhaps it
will. Maybe the first thing a Harris-Walz administration does is act
on Walz’s own stated top priority and push for a national paid
family leave bill. 

But I’m not in my idealistic 20s anymore — I’m in my realistic
40s, which means I can remember what happened the last time I dared to
hope for such outcomes. I’m now old enough to know the old
fool-me-once lesson
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will only be real policy change if enough people _demand_ it, rather
than assume everything will happen just because the vibes happen to be
positive right now. 

2024 may be the ultimate vibes election, and sure: Good vibes are
good. But good policy would be a lot better. Just listen to the
Minnesota coach-turned-governor’s plain-spoken talk about school
lunches or paid sick leave — I’m guessing he’d agree.

Time and again, The Lever has shown that independent journalism
empowered by everyday people, rather than billionaires and massive
global corporations, can move the needle. Our reporting led to
legislation being introduced in Congress, has been referenced in
presidential speeches, and is driving national conversations across
the political spectrum.

Perhaps most importantly, our work provides you with the insights you
need to be a truly informed citizen — so you can know where your
efforts are most needed.

If you are able, please click here now
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of The Lever and help us hold the powerful accountable.

* Harris-Walz
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* Democrats
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* populism
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