On the mediocrity and mendacity of Tim Walz

No wonder Kamala Harris was so happy with him; he's a less ambitious Joe Biden. We haven't had anyone this small on the national stage at least since Dan Quayle.

Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s new vice-presidential candidate, plays as a huntin’ and fishin’ Midwestern dad.

In truth, he leans even harder left than Harris. As governor of Minnesota, he legalized recreational cannabis, pushed net-zero carbon emissions, made his state a sanctuary for teen transgender surgeries, and was a hard-core Covid authoritarian.

All predictable for a blue-state governor. But put aside Walz’s policies (for now) and consider what we have learned about his personality and history since he was picked.

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(The truths Tim Walz would rather you don’t read. For under 20 cents a day.)

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Nothing fueled Walz’s rise in the last few weeks more than his canny description of JD Vance and Donald Trump as “weird.”

The media and Democrats lauded him as plainspoken, a straight shooter who calls it as he sees it. A typical New York Times encomium¹ for him began:

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota presents as a regular dad from the Midwest. He hunts. He fishes. He ice fishes... He is so normal that his normality has become exceptional…

[He has] the energy of a sitcom dad, one who embodies the archetype so winningly that he walks onto the pilot set and immediately becomes a star.

But n comparing Walz to a breakout actor, the Times may have stumbled upon an unfortunate truth.

When it comes to his military service, arguably the key to his political biography, Walz has - at best - danced between the raindrops for a long time. He put in 24 years in a Minnesota Army National Guard battalion, rising steadily through the enlisted ranks.

But he quit in May 2005, just before his unit was deployed to Iraq.

Walz says he had decided to leave in order to run for Congress before the unit received any formal deployment orders. The key word there is “formal.” Walz was among the battalion’s most senior enlisted men, and it was no secret by the end of 2004 that the war in Iraq was not going well and United States would likely need to call up and send more units.

Further, at some point early in 2005 Walz’s battalion had received what was known as a “warning order,” giving its soldiers advance notice that they might formally be deployed.

In the event, Walz’s battalion was merged into the Army calls a Brigade Combat Team and was deployed for 22 months, from late 2005 through July 2007. For 16 months, the brigade was in Iraq, which at least at the time was longer continuous combat deployment than any other military unit in the war.

Walz was not there for any of it.

And at least some of the men he served with - including Tom Behrends, who replaced Walz as Command Sergeant Major, the battalion’s top enlisted man - never forgave him. Behrends has repeatedly called out Walz for quitting the unit.

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Yet as he ran for Congress in 2006, Walz presented his time in the military in a way that could easily have fooled voters into believing he had seen combat.

On his Website, he told voters that he “served overseas with his battalion in support of Operation Enduring Freedom — ” the Afghan war. (Operation Iraqi Freedom was the official name for the Iraq war.)

Technically, Walz was not lying, at least then. His Minnesota National Guard unit had deployed to Italy in 2003, where it helped guard Air Force bases where pilots flew missions over Afghanistan.

So, yes, he had “supported” the Afghan war - though the average contractor chow hall worker at Kandahar Air Base had more to do with its success than he did, and more risk. (As someone else wrote today, Donald Trump has now faced more live fire than Walz.)

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(So have I. Not that it matters.)

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Most Americans have not served in the military.

Nor have most recent Presidents. Not since George H.W. Bush have we had a President who risked his life in combat. So not serving does not disqualify politicians from winning national office.

But lying about service still may.

Time will tell how far Walz crossed the line in discussing his service. X users have already unearthed a video from 2017 where he mentions “weapons of war that I carried in war,” words that are clearly untrue.

It’s just one comment. If more come out, Walz and Harris will have a five-alarm fire on their hands.

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Walz used his service at another crucial moment, to explain away a 1995 arrest for drunken driving.

On Sept. 23, 1995, a Nebraska state trooper clocked Walz driving 96 miles an hour. He failed a field sobriety test and agreed to a blood draw, which put his blood alcohol level at 0.128 percent - between six and eight drinks in one to three hours.

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(Doin’ 96 in a 55.)

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At the time, the Nebraska legal limit was 0.1 percent (today it is 0.08 in most states, and some are considering a 0.05 percent limit, which Utah has adopted as law). The judge allowed Walz to plead guilty to reckless driving rather than drunken driving and gave him a $200 fine. (His driver’s license had already been administratively suspended for 90 days.)

The arrest came up in Walz’s 2006 run for Congress - and Walz’s campaign manager blamed his military service for what had happened, telling a local newspaper on Sept. 7, 2006:

Walz's campaign manager Kerry Greeley didn't dispute that Walz was speeding when he was pulled over that night, but she said Walz was not drunk. She attributed the misunderstanding to Walz's deafness, a condition resulting from his years of serving as an artillerist in the Army National Guard.

"He couldn't understand what the officer was saying to him," Greeley said…

The judge eventually threw out the DUI charges against Walz and chastised the officer for not realizing that Walz was deaf, Greeley said.

Greeley’s statement was completely false, as the transcript from the hearing shows.

Walz and his lawyer were contrite at the hearing - “he feels terrible about this,” the lawyer said. They did not raise hearing loss as a defense.

Instead, the lawyer claimed Walz had sped because the trooper moved close behind him without turning on his warning lights, leading Walz to accelerate away. (The lawyer offered no evidence for this claim.) Both sides agreed on the 0.128 percent blood draw.

And the judge said nothing to chastise the officer, instead criticizing Walz for drinking and driving. “You are an impaired driver at that situation end you rue the risk of killing yourself and killing somebody else,” he said.

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(Help me get to the truth.)

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Like failing to serve, drinking and driving arrests do not disqualify politicians from national office, especially when they have occurred decades earlier. George W. Bush was arrested for driving under the influence in 1976 and won a Presidential race 24 years later.

But Walz now has demonstrated what can only be called a pattern of hiding and eliding damaging truths about his life - and doing so in clever and purposeful ways. Had his campaign manager seen the transcript of the court hearing when she lied about Walz’s drunk driving case? Or was she depending on Walz’s word? The latter seems far more likely. Reporters should ask them both.

The games Walz played around his military service - both his decision to quit his battalion with a deployment looming and the way he characterized that decision and his service afterwards - are even more troubling. He doesn’t have to be a hero.

But he shouldn’t pretend to be one.

1. Sorry, fancy way to say “testimonial,” but it fits better, an encomium is heavy on the over-the-topness.