John Jefferson
There’s no way to argue that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz isn’t a man’s man.
The 60-year-old teacher-turned-politician, who Vice President Kamala Harris tapped as her running-mate less than three weeks ago, exudes a certain rural sensibility that pervades midwestern states.
He served nearly a quarter-century in the National Guard; is a gun owner who won a Congressional marksmanship contest; and an avid hunter.
He’s also a man who spent years coaching high school football, that most American of pastimes that whole generations of men across the country have cited as a formative experience in their lives. It’s so central to the cultural zeitgeist that entire films and TV shows have been built around telling the stories of high school football teams.
The image of a high school football coach is often one of a whistle-clutching neanderthal, too busy focusing on winning to touch anything “politically correct.”
But Walz and the Harris campaign are making a point of highlighting the ways that the Minnesota governor has sought to break that cultural mold – like when the then-football coach took the initiative to sponsor a gay-straight alliance at the school where he worked.
One of his former students, Seth Elliot Meyer, told The Independent that his initial impression of Walz as a paragon of traditional masculinity was simply dead wrong.
“I sort of naively believed that someone who was a big, masculine dude with a deep voice was never someone who’s going to be on my side,” he said.
Instead, he recalled how Walz “was totally fine being a dude who would say, ‘Why the hell aren’t we all treated equal?’”
Before the former teacher delivered the closing keynote on the third night of the Democratic convention on Wednesday, he was introduced by a gaggle of former students and a former colleague with whom he coached a championship football team in Minnesota.
One of the students, Ben Ingman, said he was also Walz’s next door neighbor, and described him as “the kind of guy you can count on to push you out of a snow bank.”
“I know, because he pushed me out of a snowbank,” Ingman said.
Ingman also recalled how Walz had taken a job coaching his seventh-grade track team to make extra money after he and his wife, Gwen Walz, had used some of their own funds to help a student pay down school lunch debt.
“Coach Walz got us excited about what we might achieve together. He believed in us, and he helped us believe in each other, and his leadership stuck that track team went on to win a state title, just like the football team,” he said, just before members of that championship team — some wearing jerseys — came on stage.
He added: “We always wish that people like that would run for office. Well, in my neighborhood, someone like that did run for office, and he’s going to be a wonderful vice president.”
The United Center in Chicago — thome of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls — went wild for the governor as he went through his stump speech, closing it out by leading the crowd in a call-and-response: “When we fight? We win!”
His wife Gwen, son and daughter, who were seen in tears in the box during his speech, joined him on stage as Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” played to close out the night’s festivities.
The images of Walz can’t help but serve as a direct counterpoint to Donald Trump’s choice of Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate.
The millennial, Yale-educated lawyer and author, who has spent the month since he was tapped fending off controversies over his offensive comments about “childless cat ladies” and a worldview of hyper-traditional gender roles, was selected because of his deep connections to the GOP’s frat-boy wing, personified by Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr, as well as MAGA-influencers like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
It’s one of the many reasons why Walz’s critique of the GOP ticket as “weird” has stuck — because voters see many of Vance’s beliefs as weird, according to polling. And because Walz, the soldier and teacher turned politician, is the opposite.
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