Honestly, this underscores something that really strikes me about Walz as a VP pick:
He appears to be a decent human being.
Some of it is almost certainly the DNC’s propaganda machine highlighting electorate-friendly aspects of his past (he was a schoolteacher! he helped low-income kids get food! he likes hunting and fishing!) but the fact that the current Republican candidates, masters of name-calling and mud-dragging, haven’t been able to pin anything worse on him than “Tampon Tim” (because he *gasp* signed legislation mandating that menstrual products be made available in school bathrooms) really speaks volumes. As does the outpouring of people, many of whom are lifelong politicians from both sides of the aisle, standing up to vouch for his character.
What’s more, it’s not something the campaign has to highlight, because it’s clearly so internalized he doesn’t even think about it.
And on the one hand, it seems like such a low bar? But on the other…while I don’t know if this was an intentional move, it’s frankly genius strategy. Populism has been on the rise globally for years, and the Republican ticket is doing their best to take advantage by stoking the dark side of crowd mentality: fear, anger, suspicion, resentment. Which only serves to highlight the brighter side that Walz is inadvertently representing: fundamental human respect and care.
In a very real way, the Democratic ticket this year has morphed into a personification of the infamous rebuke that halted a similar era of suspicion and division: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”