With Walz Pick, Kamala Harris Leans In — to the Left

National Review Online

Tuesday, August 06, 2024

 

Kamala Harris picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate.

 

It was a surprise that she didn’t go with Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of the must-have battleground state of Pennsylvania. But there was a very public pressure campaign against Shapiro based on the fact that he’s a Jewish supporter of Israel who has criticized pro-Hamas protesters. Shapiro also projects a pragmatic image and departed from progressive orthodoxy by flirting with Republicans on school vouchers, another unforgivable offense. On top of this, one of Pennsylvania’s senators, John Fetterman, loathes him and worked to knife him in public and private.

 

It’s impossible to know how much the critique of the anti-Israel Left affected Harris’s decision, but her choice is exactly what you’d expect of a candidate afraid to cross the party’s young activist base.

 

Walz is a favorite of the MSNBC crowd who is up-to-date with every progressive fashion and has governed as far left as possible, while he is supposed to be folksy and nonthreatening — think a left-wing Tim Kaine.

 

Walz is an avuncular former high-school teacher and veteran who represented a red congressional district as a relative moderate. When he became governor and got unified control of the legislature in his second term, he dropped the pretense of moderation and has jammed through a radical agenda — on abortion, on trans policy, and on education. He gave illegal aliens driver’s licenses and state-funded health-care benefits, and felons the right to vote. He spent the state’s budget surplus in a massive spending spree on everything from free college to free breakfasts and lunches for students. The state mandated carbon-free energy by 2040 and adopted a slew of other regulations. Myriad taxes and fees were adopted to pay for it all.

 

Perhaps Walz’s foremost failure was allowing Minneapolis to burn during the BLM riots in 2020, unrest that he declared was the result of the government not adopting enough DEI initiatives — after initially blaming white supremacists and drug cartels. In the wake of the disorder, crime remained elevated in Minneapolis, and nearly half of the police force quit. Many have yet to be replaced.

 

Kamala Harris has been trying to moderate her image since her ascension a couple of weeks ago. Walz doesn’t help in that regard at all, unless she thinks she’ll look moderate compared to her running mate. Harris-Walz will be the most left-wing ticket in American history (even the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket in 1940 wasn’t woke).

 

The electoral calculation is that Walz will help with rural voters and in the Blue Wall states. During his 2022 reelection, though, he performed as badly as — or worse than — Joe Biden in the rural parts of Minnesota; his strength was in the Twin Cities area.

 

The best that can be said of the pick is that by choosing perhaps the most left-wing governor in America who is a darling of the online Left and acceptable to pro-Hamas agitators, she’s not hiding who she is.