The Last Walz

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, had been planning to run for a third term to his office.  This week, bowing to political realities, he announced that he would not run for re-election.

Minnesota has become embroiled in a series of scandals involving fraud schemes over federal money given to state-administered social services programs, most notably  a nonprofit group that claimed to be providing meals to children during the pandemic.  Other state-run social services have been affected, the most recent example being social-services fraud occurring at day care centers and health care companies run by Americans of Somali (or Somalian) origin, which right-wingers have used to discredit the entire Somali-American population, which mostly lives in Minnesota.  Walz is under too much pressure to get to the bottom of all this even as Republicans in Congress plan to get to the bottom of all this even more, even as Walz has defended his Somali-American constituents from being painted with a broad brush by the right for racist reasons.

Walz made the announcement that he would step down at the end of his term on January 6 - one day before Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis, so now he has to deal with that as well.  He thinks he could have won a third term - maybe he could have - but he has decided that he can't do his duties as governor of Minnesota and run for another term at the same time.

Walz owes his national reputation to having been selected as Kamala Harris's vice presidential running mate, but it turned out that he was a few spaces down the list.  He got the job by default for having called Trump and Vance "weird" and for his avuncular image . . . and he did geographically balance the ticket.  But he did not come from a state that was seriously in play - Minnesota has been reliably Democratic in presidential elections since 1976 - and Harris passed over more logical choices for reasons that boiled down to political incorrectness.  Harris thought that Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, was likely toxic due to his support for Israel and his own Jewish heritage, and she thought that Pete Buttigieg, her first choice, would not be accepted in an office a heartbeat away from the Presidency because of his sexual orientation.  Walz turned out to be a first-rate second-rate man, and his Minnesota niceness reassured no one in his debate with Vance.  His biggest asset - calling MAGA weird - was toned down, and Walz toned down his "weird" rhetoric unwillingly; Democratic consultants - the only Democrats who made out better after the 2024 election than before, thanks to the high fees they command - told him to cut it out.  Walz even lacked the grit of the most famous Minnesotan to occupy the Vice Presidency, Hubert Humphrey.     

I think it's safe to say that, come January 2027, when Walz's term expires, both he and Harris will be political hasbeens.  Anyone who still has a Harris-Walz campaign button in mint condition is likely to own a real collector's item, because such buttons are bound to be rare.  But they won't be worth anything despite their limited quantity.  The only reason there'll be so few of them is too many former Harris supporters will have long since thrown out their Harris-Walz campaign buttons out of bitter disappointment.