Walz Is Not My Sort of Midwesterner

Among the myriad reasons not to make Tim Walz the second-most powerful person on the planet—his radicalism, his propensity for overstating his international travels, his weirdness—the one that looms largest in my mind is entirely personal: As a native Midwesterner, I do not wish for Walz to become the standard-bearer of my region.

In the course of his brief stint at Kamala Harris’s running mate, Walz—who was born in Nebraska and is the present Democratic governor of Minnesota—has attempted to make his goofily gregarious, distressingly demonstrative, and amiably annoying persona his central selling point. 

During the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, when asked to account for his misleading statements about his proximity to China at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Walz was true to his “just a regular guy who doesn’t know any better” image. “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times,” he said, possibly becoming the first-major party presidential or vice-presidential candidate to call himself a “knucklehead.”

Then, trying to mop up after that debate performance, Walz again attempted to excuse himself by implying he was just an ordinary dope. “Look, not bad for a football coach—not bad!” he said, reminding voters yet again that among his qualifications for being second in line to the presidency was coaching high-school football.

This would be merely amusing, in an apocalyptic sort of way, were I not an inhabitant of the geographical region that Walz goes out of his way to represent each time he walks onto a stage or sits down for an interview. He is making all of us who hail from the Midwest seem like affable rubes.

I write here with some authority. My father was from Marion, Ohio, and my mother was from Sioux City, Iowa. Both were serious, smart, and sober-minded people. I myself was born in, and live outside of, Columbus, Ohio. I am personally familiar with the widely agreed-upon virtues of Midwestern culture: neighborliness, commonsensical-ness, civic trust, enthusiasm for collegiate athletics, especially those played on the gridiron, and a high degree of respect for police officers, firemen, and snow-plow drivers. 

All of this has very little to do with the frenetic hand-waving and brow-furrowing of Tim Walz. Staidness, not zaniness, is the quality I would more often associate with Midwesterners, including James Thurber (b. 1894, Columbus), who drew cartoons about listless, long-suffering men, and Charles Schulz (b. 1922, Minneapolis), who drew comic strips about depression-inclined schoolchildren. 

In my state, the presiding political family for much of the last century were the Tafts, who were the picture of aristocratic understatement. In an anecdote recounted by sociologists E. Digby Baltzell and Howard G. Schneiderman in the book The Protestant Establishment Revisited, the wife of the future Ohio Republican Senator Robert A. Taft did not attempt to portray her husband, then running for office, as just one of the guys: “He did not start from humble beginnings. My husband is a very brilliant man. He had a fine education at Yale. He has been well trained for his job. Isn’t that what you prefer when you pick leaders to work for you?” His grandson, the former Ohio Republican Governor Bob Taft, boasted a similar unexciting competency. 

These qualities were not unique to Ohio Republicans. Ohio’s Democratic Senator (and former astronaut) John Glenn had something of this same unpretentious reserve. 

But wait, you say: Walz does not claim to be a dignified public servant—he’s a former football coach and therefore entitled to act nutty. I beg to differ. Where I live, everybody’s idea of a great football coach is one Wayne Woodrow Hayes, who, in his capacity as Ohio State University’s head football coach, had in common with Walz only two things: He was stocky and had white hair. Hayes was a hard-charging warrior, not a giddy follower of woke trends. Let us imagine what Hayes would have thought of men playing in women’s sports.

Walz seems determined to confirm the coastal elites’ opinion of the Midwest as a bastion of poor taste and tackiness; it’s no coincidence that Jim Gaffigan, in his impression of Walz on Saturday Night Live last weekend, said his suit was purchased from Costco. Yet I associate my home region with the modest courtliness of the Midwestern narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, who, at one point in the novel, says this about his homeland: “That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”

Nowhere in the novel does Carraway describe himself or anyone else as a knucklehead.

Now, I have never been to Minnesota or Nebraska. Even so, I have known people from both states, and I have never met anyone who is anything like Tim Walz. His hokey dorkiness disqualifies him from becoming the highest-serving elected official from our region. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, soaringly, of Midwesterners’ “awe for a fertile continent stretching forever in all directions”; Walz gets laughs for having committed to memory the jingle for Menards. We can do better than this. 

Happily, there happens to be an Ohioan on the Republican ticket this November.