Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
The 1999 Mankato West High School state champions take the stage at the DNC.
I’m not sure what convention planners were thinking, but it was asking a lot of their vice-presidential nominee, normie dad and high school coach Tim Walz, to have to follow Stevie Wonder, John Legend, and Oprah, whose perfectly intoned and choreographed surprise appearance was closer to a musical performance than a speech. Each of the three were wonderful in their own distinct ways. Oprah had the kind of whammo zingers that speakers have been hurling at Trump and the Republicans throughout the convention, but she delivered them (e.g., we’re running against “people who believe books are dangerous and assault weapons are safe”) with such panache as to make clear the difference between a pro and mere amateurs.
A few of the pols who preceded Walz to the podium were pros themselves. House Democratic Leader and perhaps Speaker-to-Be Hakeem Jeffries proved himself to be something of a unicorn by delivering a genuinely rousing speech. Legislative leaders, even great legislative leaders like Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson and, yes, Nancy Pelosi, are masters of inside ball, knowing which buttons to push and which forces to mobilize to get their members to vote a certain way, and which members can afford to take a risky vote on a certain issue and which can’t. Nowhere in their job description does “ability to deliver a compelling public speech” appear, as Pelosi, surely the best pol the Dems have had in many years, demonstrated in her brief, flat speech last night. Still, she delivered the highest form of Pelosi praise to Kamala Harris by calling her “astute and strategic”—cardinal virtues in Pelosi’s world, and pretty good virtues in anyone’s.
The best campaigner I have ever seen also preceded Walz to the podium, but he was so visibly and audibly frail that his super-sharp ability to make a point more effectively than any of his fellow pols, while still present, was muted. Bill Clinton still could inform the nation that a look at the 51 million new jobs America had created since the end of the Cold War revealed that 50 million had been created during Democratic presidencies and just one million during Republican presidencies. He still could ask listeners to imagine what foreign leaders must think when they hear Trump riff on “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” But while suffering none of the occasional verbal mishaps that age has imposed on Joe Biden, Clinton was at times as inaudible as Biden, and he allowed as how this was likely to be his final Democratic convention, ending a streak that had begun in 1972.
But even a frail Clinton, much less an Oprah on what might have been her best night, was a tough act for Tim Walz to follow. So the planners decided to go with—actually, to magnify—just how neighborhood normal the guy really is. Just as the top banana of old vaudeville acts would be preceded on stage by a line of chorus girls, Walz was preceded by the now middle-aged members of Mankato West High School’s 1999 state champion football team, for whom Walz was defensive coordinator. Normie dads, some now way out of shape, led the way for Coach Walz to take the stage and deliver his distinctive normie American, good-neighbor, progressive Democrat acceptance speech. Some of it was adapted from the stump speech he’s been giving to great effect around the country. But it hit all the right notes for a national audience.
If all this normie-ness didn’t fully normalize Walz’s progressive achievements, he took care to tout not only his enactment of paid sick leave and groundbreaking pro-union laws and universal school breakfasts and lunches, but also, repeatedly, the middle-class tax cuts he signed into law as well. Walz also spoke, more than I’ve heard him do so before, in his coach persona. There was a bit of John Madden drawing play diagrams in his delivery, and a touch of Pat O’Brien playing the sainted Knute Rockne in The Spirit of Notre Dame, telling Democrats to win one for—well, not for the Gipper (who had been played in that 1930s Warner Bros. film by a young Ronald Reagan)—but for Kamala, and the nation, and your kids.
Democrats are clearly endeavoring to take two fundamental identities away from the Republicans and make them their own. With a huge assist from the Republican justices who ended women’s right to abortions, they are very skillfully stripping Republicans of their claims to being the party of freedom, while noting all the freedoms—from theocrats, from gun violence, from workplace tyrants—that now find their champions in Democratic ranks. And with a huge assist from Republicans who’ve turned their party into a cult that worships a malignant narcissist, they’re proclaiming that American normality now is embodied in the Democratic Party, where normality is personified not just by Coach Walz but by Harris as well, by the very diversity of very different normal Americans that has always been the essence of the real American exceptionalism. Stripped of those two faux identities, that leaves Republicans as the party of opposition to both majority rule and minority rights: anti-democracy and just plain weird.
