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Walz goes to Harvard and proves his point: '10% problematic' • Minnesota Reformer [1]
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Date: 2025-05-08
Gov. Tim Walz got dragged online and on cable news last week for some comments he made at the Harvard Institute of Politics.
“But I also was on the ticket quite honestly, ya know, because I could code talk to white guys watching football and fixing their truck and doing that. That I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look you can do this and vote for this.’”
If true, and it probably is, “it was an epic miscalculation,” as CNN’s Abby Phillip put it.
As Walz himself goes on to say at the Harvard talk, they didn’t win enough of those voters in the swing states.
Though that’s ultimately the responsibility of Kamala Harris, there are a few problems here.
By saying the quiet part out loud, Walz condescended to these voters.
Walz is supposed to be the Democrats’ “authentic” guy, and here he is, at the most elite institution in America, talking about how Harris thought she could win them over with this one weird trick.
A lot of people — including a lot of non-college men in the Midwest — don’t seem to care about identity or representation as much as Democrats think. After all, many of them supported the least Midwestern guy imaginable: a draft-dodging, New York City billionaire who’s gone through three wives.
Relatedly, the idea relies on the fiction that if you have a well-worn Carhartt duck coat, they’ll ignore the policies they don’t like, on immigration, on guns, on LGBTQ issues.
Even if you could pull that off — it’s possible: We’ve seen Republican voters completely swap their beliefs on issues like tariffs and Russia because they are in thrall to Donald Trump — you don’t say it out loud. It’s like explaining a con to people who passed on the con.
Or if you’re playing pundit for the day, find a way to explain your place on the ticket without the awful “code talk” and “permission structure.”
Maybe he picked it up from the unnamed campaign aide who appeared in a CNN story about his (cringe) debate prep last year.
“People assume that he is a walking permission structure for rural, exurban, White male hunters,” said a senior campaign aide.
Walz has been traveling the country in the past few months, especially some ruby red regions — including Texas, Ohio and West Virginia — where big crowds are appreciating that someone is putting voice to their anger.
The national media is back in swooning mode.
The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty went out on the road with him to Ohio:
“The Minnesota governor these days is looser, funnier, more profane — settling comfortably back into the style that got him picked for the ticket before he was shrink-wrapped and scripted by the hypercautious handlers of Kamala Harris’s campaign. He counts himself among the many Democrats who consider his 2024 performance a disappointment.”
Walz does indeed connect with people, his comments at Harvard about “permission structure” notwithstanding.
In an impressive moment of self-awareness, he acknowledged his foibles in the same Harvard remarks, saying the Harris campaign may have kept him locked away because “I think I give you pretty good stuff, but I’ll also give you 10% problematic.” You may remember during the campaign when they had to clean up his false claim that his family used IVF, for instance.
Walz’s full life before politics gives him access to the authentic way most of us live and talk, to the stress and triumphs of parenting and community.
But you can’t just say whatever comes into your Diet Mountain Dew brain.
Americans have often elected the opposite of whomever is currently president — consider Barack Obama and Trump. If the pattern holds, the next president will be thoughtful, deliberate and grounded.
So if Walz is going to run for president — or, for that matter, another term for governor — he might consider thinking a touch more before he talks.
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