One of the more ingenious creations of the people behind the Onion, the satirical periodical that pokes affectionate fun and distorts the eccentricities and banalities of the American heartland, was ”Area Dad”.
The series of news stories depicted the foibles and obsessions of the American family men found in every corner of the country with headlines like Area Dad Just Wants Computer with the Basics, or Area Dad Stares Longingly At Covered Grill In the Backyard.
It was up to each reader to decide how this caricature looked and sounded. But one of the chief appeals of Tim Walz is that he seems to embody a limitless number of the everyman qualities that the Democratic ticket hope will make him instantly identifiable and relatable to voters in the Great Lake states that formed his character.
So suddenly, on Wednesday night, a real-life version of Area Dad came bounding on to the vast, starry stage that had already hosted Stevie Wonder, Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey to the delight of the crowd.
Plucking Walz from the relative obscurity of his governorship of Minnesota ahead of more obvious choices had the instant effect of casting Kamala Harris’s campaign in a new light. From their first rallies together, Harris and Walz presented an improbable double act that somehow sounded and looked right.
And over the past few weeks, campaign rallies have leant heavily into telling the Tim Walz story, from the 24 years he served in the National Guard to his turn in college through the GI Bill and his teaching years, where he met his wife Gwen, and the birth of their first daughter, Hope, through fertility treatment.
Bill Clinton was still in his first term as president when Walz made the move from Nebraska to Minnesota, where his wife’s family lived. He was earning $25,000 a year then as a teacher at Mankato West high school, where his wife Gwen also taught, and had interviewed for a role as an assistant football coach that brought about a $2,500 bonus.
Since Walz’s nomination, the sports tale of the transformation of the hitherto luckless school team has been told and retold, and many of its players, Area Dads themselves now, were interviewed about their memories of the years when they went from reliably winless and frequently scoreless to an unstoppable force.
Three years after Walz’s appointment as assistant, the team won the1999 state championship. When Walz did his first solo rally, in Omaha, Nebraska, he was introduced to the familiar lyrics of the John Mellencamp easy rock classic Small Town: “Well, I was born in a small town/And I live in a small town/Probably die in a small town/Oh, those small communities.”
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It’s a stanza that could easily have served for the likely trajectory of Walz’s life had he not heeded the urging of his students and decided to enter politics. They played the song again here in Chicago but to mark his first speaking appearance at a convention, they also had John Legend and Sheila E performing Let’s Go Crazy, in homage to Prince and Minnesota. They even had members of the 1999 Scarlets state-winning team run out in their jeans, filling out the shirts even without the pads these days.
“In Minnesota we trust a coach that was zero and 27 into state champions,” Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesotan senator, said in her introduction.
“We trust a hunter who has stood in a deer stand in ten-degree weather. In Minnesota we love a Dad in plaid. Who better to take on the price of gas than a guy who can pull over and change your tyre? Who better to find common ground than a guy who is Midwestern common sense. A former football coach knows how to level the playing field and a former schoolteacher knows how to school the likes of JD Vance.”
It was a full-on charm offensive from the Great Plains designed to present Walz as the ultimate straight shooter: the guy you know even if you have never met him. Walz was 40, sufficiently old to have settled into the grooves of the life he and his family had fashioned when he found himself listening to the urging of his students who thought he should run for Congress.
“They saw in me that I had hoped to inspire in them: a commitment to the common good,” he explained.
“So there I was, a 40-something high school teacher with little kids, zero political experience and no money running in a deep red district. But you know what? Never underestimate a public-school teacher.”
This Chicago arena setting – its vastness, the umbrella of brightly lit broadcast network banners forming a horseshoe-shaped banner around the arena – is alien to Walz. At a human level, the extraordinarily dramatic turn his life has taken over the past month must still be catching up with him.
This is a lightning-fast campaign and Walz has been tasked with educating the other states on the reforms he introduced to Minnesota – paid leave for people suffering from health issues, sweeping tax cuts, free school breakfasts and lunches for students. “When other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger in ours”.
And he also has to make himself known: the football man who ran a gay-straight school alliance, the deer hunter who supports gun reform, the teacher, the congressman, the governor and, at heart, one of the most enduring American archetypes: the coach, with his clipboard and his pep-talks and his well-leafed library of life lessons hard learned and passed on.
It wasn’t difficult to see why Harris was attracted to the idea of having Walz stand alongside her as the election campaign enters fourth-quarter territory. Those spoken of as likely candidates were also on stage last night, including Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor who is a formidable public speaker, and Pete Buttigieg, the transport secretary and another midwesterner with burnished military credentials, who is a truly brilliant one.
Walz offers a form of riveting sincerity and a warm crinkly grin rather than rhetorical dazzlement. He is 20 years older than JD Vance, the Ohioan standing as Republican vice-presidential nominee. So, he came of age in a different midwest, the 1970s version, before the economic hollowing out and the terrible opioid epidemic that Vance has outlined fully took hold.
But it is the older man who has retained a steadfastly progressive and tolerant outlook on life, both local and national.
“I grew up in Butte, Nebraska. A town with 400 people. I had 24 kids in my high school class – and none of them went to Yale. But I’ll tell ya what, growing up in a small town like that, you learn how to take care of each other. That family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do. But they’re your neighbours. And you look out for them, and they look out for you. Everybody belongs. And everybody has a responsibility to contribute.”
Those opening few lines contained the essence of the message he will repeat on the Democratic carnival over the next few months. It was enough to turn the Democratic delegates into football fans for the evening as they returned their appreciation with what is becoming his unofficial nickname.
“Coach! Coach! Coach!”
There were a few moments when Tim Walz looked as though he couldn’t believe what was happening as he gazed out at the sea of people, chanting his name. That was understandable. Area Dad Runs For Vice-President is a headline nobody would have thought believable before this crazy American election year.
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