“You might not know it, but I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this,” Tim Walz said demurely towards the end of his keynote Democratic national convention address on Wednesday night.
The moment wreaked of understatement. The look on his face, the way he raised his white eyebrows as if he were apologizing, the shrug of his shoulders. Even the phrase “big speech”.
This wasn’t a big speech. It was a monumental speech, with the future direction of a country of 333 million people riding on it.
But then Walz dropped his faux modesty and got to work. “I have given a lot of pep talks,” he said.
From then on it was full steam ahead towards the goal line. After all, if you’re Walz, a scarcely known governor from the midwestern state of Minnesota, and you’ve just been yanked into the most significant election of recent times in the most powerful country on Earth, then what else are you going to do at the climax of your 16-minute oration than invoke your years as a high school football coach?
Friday Night Lights never had it so good.
As thousands of Democratic delegates from all 50 states packed into the United Center chanted “Coach! Coach! Coach!”, he conjured up the nail-biting finish that the US is now entering. “It’s the fourth quarter,” he said, rocket launching the crowd into a paroxysm of excitement.
“We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And, boy, do we have the right team.”
Walz never got to tell the delegates the score at the end of the game, but then he didn’t have to. He had already won the contest for their hearts and minds.
If Donald Trump were watching the speech on his favoured Fox News, it might have stirred the odd feeling in him. Last month, the former president and Republican nominee caused quite the stir by claiming that vice-presidential running mates make “virtually no impact” on elections.
Trump better pray he’s right. Not because of his guy, JD Vance, who is flunking in the polls. But because of this other guy: the plain-talking, gun-owning, and football-coaching former public school teacher.
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When Kamala Harris’s VP pick took the stage sometime after 10pm, he began a little hesitantly. Maybe Walz wasn’t joking, that “big speech” thing was a little much.
But as he warmed to his subject, and the delegates got behind him with their deafening cheers, this “son of the Nebraska plains”, as his wife Gwen Walz described him, got into his stride. He channeled the grit and the empathy that has already endeared him to millions of Democrats in the 15 short days in which he has been on the national stage.
He deployed words such as “neighbor” (seven times), “school” (eight) and “freedom” (nine) to flesh out a picture of himself as the homely guy next door who cares about you and your family and wants you to lead your best life. When he got to the bit about his record as governor, he turned the dial up, giving vent to his anger and passion.
“We made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day,” he said, eliciting one of the biggest roars of the night. “While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing kids’ hunger from ours.”
In the two weeks of Walz’s breathtaking propulsion into the political stratosphere – meteoric doesn’t do justice to his rise – Trump and team have tried hard to land punches on him. They have accused him of lying about his military record, pegged him as a “radical leftist” who wants to turn the country communist, and rolled out the old attack line that he wants to take your guns.
So far, opinion surveys suggest, such efforts have been as sticky as water on a duck’s back.
But then, how do you knock the military service of someone who spent 24 years in the national guard, even if he did misstate certain details of his time in uniform? Nor is it easy to portray his legislative record as extreme liberalism when the so-called “Minnesota miracle” of bills that he passed last year included not only universal free school meals, but paid family and medical leave as well as several other reforms that are no more revolutionary than the basic public services routinely provided by virtually every other industrialised nation.
And how do you tear down a person for being anti-second amendment when, as he said on Wednesday night: “I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress, and I got the trophies to prove it”?
Not to mention that before Walz came on, the convention organisers reconvened the 1999 football team that he coached at Mankato West high school all the way to the state championship.
In the end, though, it wasn’t the folksy football metaphors that hang in the air after the speech was done. It was the determination that was conveyed of a man with values forged in small town Nebraska to stop the advance of a someone who spends all day “insulting people and blaming others”.
“We’ll turn the page on Donald Trump,” Coach Walz said. “That’s how we’ll build a country where workers come first, healthcare and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom.”