Ballz to the Walz, Dems

I said this earlier about the importance of making a Vice Presidential pick for your campaign: Your pick sets the tone.

So the tone Kamala Harris set for the Democratic Party by selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate is this:

BALLZ TO THE WALZ, BABY.

What? It's a perfectly cromulent phrase from my youth as a suburban white punk. It means to "go all out," to blitz, to push forward with great force, to fight and not stop until the fight is done. Learned it in middle school, said it through high school, and then didn't really say it much in college because the study load was a bit fatiguing.

I am awaiting the inevitable t-shirt from Etsy, by the by.

The Balloon Juice community is all aflutter, as are my folks from the TNC Horde. To get a sense of why, here's Russell Berman at the Atlantic (paywalled) to explain it some:

In the realm of presidential politics, progressives have become accustomed to disappointment. Joe Biden wasn’t their first (or second) choice in 2020. Nor, for that matter, was Kamala Harris. And Democratic nominees typically pick moderates for their running mates. So when Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her choice for vice president this morning, progressives experienced an unusual feeling: elation...

Progressives had latched onto Walz’s dark-horse candidacy over the past two weeks, seeing him as a more appealing option, both ideologically and politically, than Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whom many believed to be the front-runner. Walz, a former teacher and high-school football coach, impressed liberals with his governing success in Minnesota, where he’s signed legislation enacting paid family leave, expanding the child-tax credit, protecting abortion rights, and lowering the cost of insulin. More recently—and perhaps more important—he charmed them with his folksy takedowns on cable news of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

“He’s just plainspoken and direct, and he’s very funny,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who served with Walz in the House, told me. “He’s got the common touch, and I think it’s an ingenious choice.”

In Walz, progressives believe they have found a Democrat who can connect with rural and white working-class voters in the crucial battlegrounds of the Midwest without compromising on the party’s policy platform. “He’s the anti-elite candidate. He comes across as the Everyman,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, told me this morning. He called Walz “a perfect counterbalance” to Harris, whom Republicans have tried to portray as, in his words, “an out-of-touch California elite...”

Harris’s announcement drew praise across a wide ideological spectrum, from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. In the final days leading up to the selection, however, the largely behind-the-scenes contest between Walz and Shapiro had become a stand-in for larger Democratic fights that the party’s embrace of Harris had otherwise suppressed. The proxy war dismayed some party allies, who urged progressives to stop their attacks on Shapiro. “It’s a false binary,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. She said that although she was “ecstatic” about the choice of Walz, she would have been just as happy if Harris had picked Shapiro or any of the other finalists, including Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky...

Harris' selection of a popular regional governor does more than just help lock in Minnesota: Walz's brand of Democratic politics has the means to appeal across the entire Rust Belt (every state in the Great Lakes region) that can provide the same electoral appeal that Shapiro or Beshear (or Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan) could have provided.

But with Walz you get a little more: Someone with a personal narrative - he and his wife used In-Vitro to have children, for example - in clear opposition to the fearmongering hypocrisy that trump's presidential ticket is offering to voters. He's not only been a soldier - 24 years of National Guard service in the artillery, putting in the years most other political wannabes would shrug off - but also a high school social sciences teacher and football coach. Someone who would be a key figure in any small town community across America.

And while he was a high school football coach - leading his team to the state finals, no less - he took the time to become the faculty advisor of that school's first Gay/Straight Alliance student group. This is one of many reasons why progressives are elated: Walz is Pro-People, has been since even before Obama and Biden stood public for gay marriage.

Where trump's pick of Vance doubled down on trump's open hostility towards immigrants, women, blacks, gays, trans, and young people, Harris' pick of Walz doubled down on getting a candidate who's eager and grinning from ear to ear and willing to work on solving problems instead of making things worse.

Balls to the walls, guys. Let's get the vote out for Dems this year.