Last week I urged Vice President Harris to select Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. I estimated Walz’s chances of selection as ranging "between zero and zero." It turns out that I was slightly off in my estimate. Please don’t turn me in to PolitiFact. I confess!
Despite the error, my estimate was based on Walz’s record in office. That was the point of my column. Walz has been a monumentally bad and destructive governor. During his second term, with DFL (Democratic) majorities in both houses of the state legislature, Walz has governed in conformity with their wishes. He has spent an $18 billion surplus without a penny of tax relief and vastly increased the scope of an overweening and incompetent state government. He has raised taxes! He has left no stone unturned in his efforts to keep up with the party’s progressive left. He does not extend Harris’s reach even so much as an inch.
By conventional metrics such as crime, educational achievement, and the like, Walz has set a horrible record in office. Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment has conveniently compiled the metrics.
The state compares poorly to the rest of the country. Violent crime rates have decreased nationally but increased in Minnesota. Reading and math proficiency scores are at 30-year lows, though per-pupil spending has skyrocketed. The price of electricity has climbed faster in Minnesota than elsewhere thanks to a renewable energy mandate. Would you be surprised to hear the population has declined as long-suffering citizens have fled the state for locales with more sensible governance?
Even the conventional metrics, though, do not begin to convey the scale of Walz’s era of misrule. He presided over the George Floyd riots that devastated the Twin Cities. His Department of Education facilitated the biggest COVID fraud in the United States. To paraphrase JFK, there are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and progressive dystopia. Let them come to Minnesota!
All of which raises the question: Why Walz? The Democrats are said to have a deep bench that has been awaiting the departure of President Biden to take the field. Maybe not.
When Harris’s shortlist was reduced to Walz and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Shapiro seemed to me the obvious choice. His presence on the ticket might not only have helped Harris prevail in the key state—the Keystone State—of Pennsylvania. It might also have helped her retain the loyalty of liberal Jewish voters looking for a way to remain loyal without a guilty conscience. Now some may feel compelled to look elsewhere.
We don’t have a good idea of Harris’s thinking at this point, but she cannot have been unaware of Shapiro’s ethnicity and religion. His mother is a Jew. His father is a Jew. He is a Jew. And he was accordingly the subject of a vicious intraparty campaign against his selection. His apparent willingness to sell out to them was not enough.
When local reporters tried to get a bead on Walz’s whereabouts yesterday, they complained that Walz wasn’t transparent. It seems to me that he was transparent in the crucial respect of concern to some substantial segment of the Democrats’ base to whom Harris is catering. He is transparently non-Jewish. As President Trump might say, that much I can tell you.
Scott W. Johnson is a retired Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the site Power Line. He is the father of Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson.