The Story of Tim Walz
Florida Man vs. Minnesota Man
Wow. Tim Walz. He’s a real MAN. What are the Republicans going to do now? Tim does all sorts of things that real men do. He shops at Menards! He can change oil! He can drive stick shift! He hunts! He wears camouflage hats! He coached high school football.
Okay. I would never do any of that stuff. I don’t even know what Menards is. I have never even opened the hood of my car. I would never dare shoot a gun (let alone buy one). I would never wear camo. And I would never let my son play football because of the brain damage. I want my son to go to Cornell, and his brain is too valuable for that.
I will let the corn-fed hicks in rural southern Minnesota play football because who cares if Tim Walz’s high school students get CTE? They are different from my precious Joseph. Their brains won’t provide as much shareholder value to the economy, so Chuck can bludgeon his head on the offensive line while Joseph studies for the MCAT. They can change my oil. They can deliver my Uber Eats from Sweetgreen. And you won’t find me living in southern rural Minnesota any time soon. No sir!
But Tim does all that stuff for me! Unfortunately, we still use the Electoral College, so we must appeal to white people in the Upper Midwest for our team to beat Donald Trump. That’s why we got Tim! He’ll definitely appeal to the rural hicks in the medieval parts of the country that happen to be in the critical swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Okay. I don’t know if Tim will appeal to those white working-class men, who delivered a victory to Trump in 2016, but I feel like he does. That’s all that matters. I need to feel like Tim will win me votes in places that I will never visit myself.
Tim Walz projects stereotypes that the college-educated white suburbanites believe about the middle of the country. Tim packages it in a “folksy” and humorous face. His shtick is not so far removed from a minstrel show, but — instead of disgusting black caricatures — the Democratic Party is presenting you with a constellation of humorous stereotypes about working-class white people, a demographic disproportionately represented in the electorates in the most critical states in the Electoral College.
The Minstrel Show
Before we further dissect the governor of Minnesota, let me explain my provocative analogy to the minstrel show. Throughout American history, people have found humor in racial stereotyping. This has manifested in its worst form in the minstrel shows of the 19th century and early 20th century, but — as long as the United States has racial tension — we will always have racial jokes imbued in our culture. Obviously, there is a spectrum of wretched to fairly innocuous. I do not know who would put the gag of Bumblebee Man from The Simpsons on the same plane as one of Al Jolson’s blackface routines, but the instinct does originate from the same place in the human psyche.
In an increasingly diversifying country, we as Americans have used humor to relieve tension between different groups. It will continue to happen, and — in media — we will poke fun at tropes for comedic effect. The blackface routines in the Vaudeville era play on stereotypes that white audiences had made about African-Americans. Many decades later, Bumblebee Man — one of the many recurring characters in The Simpsons — does not directly mock Mexicans in the same way as blackface acts did to African-Americans, but Bumblebee Man targets a characteristic of Spanish-language television in the United States. In fact, the creators of The Simpsons based Bumblebee Man on actual Mexican comedic television actor named Roberto Gómez Bolaños, known by his nickname of Chesperito.
Chesperito played many goofy comedic characters in Mexican television, but Bumblebee Man was specifically based on Chesperito’s character “El Chapulín Colorado”, which loosely translates in English to the “The Red Grasshopper”. This character itself parodied absurd superhero characters, but — nevertheless — Bumblebee Man in The Simpsons plays on humorous perceptions that white Americans might have about Mexican and Mexican-American culture, particularly, absurd slapstick comedy on television.
Again, Bumblebee Man is not a Mexican form of blackface, but it is rooted in the same origins of creating humor about the cultures foreign to the majority or plurality of a country. Regardless, I bet that someone somewhere is petitioning to take Bumblebee Man out of The Simpsons as they did to Apu, the Indian immigrant owner of the convenience store the Kwik-E-Mart.
The Tim Walz Show
How does the portrayal of Tim Walz relate to minstrel shows from the Vaudeville era or Mexican television from the 1970s? Okay, Tim is a real man who probably actually hunts. Bumblebee Man and Jolson’s character in The Jazz Singer are fictionalized people, but — over the next three months until the election — Tim actually might not be a real man. You will never meet him. In this hyper-compressed Democratic nomination process due to President Joe Biden’s sudden and late departure, the Democrats and the media will need to concoct a Tim Walz to appear on television. He will become a television character no different from Chesperito in Spanish-language television during the 1970s.
Walz will be playing a fictionalized version of himself. Interestingly, Walz serves as governor of Minnesota, a state that elected Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a third-party governor in 1998. Ventura had played a fictionalized version of himself during his professional wrestling and, later, acting career — which culminated in the fiction seeping into the real world when he ran a successful populist campaign in Minnesota in 1998 under the Reform Party moniker.
In a normal nomination process, a presidential nominee would organically emerge over many months while Kamala Harris was ushered in and coronated by the party in late July. The Democrats and the media must spend a large amount of time and resources branding and packaging her to the American voters, most of whom have very little idea of who she is.
The vice presidential pick has always been concocted in this manner, but it will especially be concocted and packaged this time because the Democrats and the media already have to do that with the top of the ticket, so they have to do it even more so with Walz. If Harris had won an organic nomination in a normal primary process, then the United States would have a much clearer idea of her as a figure independent of her president Joe Biden.
So what are the Democrats doing with Walz? Just like a minstrel show or professional wrestling, they are taking the real Tim but exaggerating certain characteristics deemed as potentially appealing to certain demographics. Over the next few weeks, you will hear about Walz being a hunter, a football coach, a guy who shops at Menards!
All of these things may be true, but the Democrats and the media are branding it to an absurd degree just as the minstrel shows had caricatures of African-Americans. This time, the target is white people, but — unlike Bumblebee Man — it really isn’t done in the way of parody. This is not the Wayans brothers in White Chicks, but — in a way — it is more disingenuous and contemptuous of the rural white working class in the critical Upper Midwestern states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The Wayans brothers were being tongue-in-cheek and not really that disrespectful even though they wore white face in their 2004 film. It was all a joke.
Tim Walz is not a joke. The Democrats really believe that his shtick will appeal to middle America. They believe that the camo Harris-Walz hat being sold online will snatch white voters, but there is really another effect of this.
This is not actually to appeal to the people that the coastal Democrats deem as Walz’s constituents. Those people in Minnesota have already abandoned Walz. His old House district (MN-1) didn’t even vote for him in his 2022 gubernatorial re-election. The days of a perceived “moderate” like Tim Walz appealing in rural Minnesota are gone. Those are strong Trump voters now.
If Walz had not chosen to leave the House and run for governor in 2018, then he likely would have lost his House seat by 2020. When he vacated the seat in 2018, it immediately flipped to the Republicans. In fact, it was only one of two seats in that entire midterm election to flip to Republicans, along with Minnesota’s 8th district in the northern end of the state in the previous Democratic stronghold of the Iron Range.
Rather, the Democrats fetishize the idea that Walz might appeal to these voters to whom they begrudgingly have to pander to win the Electoral College. The Rust Belt will decide this election, and many coastal Democrats have contempt for these people — the voters who gave the Trump the presidency in 2016 but swung back to Biden in 2020. Picking Walz gives these coastal Democrats comfort no different from the 2012 GOP Autopsy idea of Marco Rubio winning the Hispanic vote for Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.
Unfortunately, for the Beltway elites, what works in fluorescent-lit offices of the Heritage Foundation or the DNC headquarters does not work in the real world. Who would have thought that Donald Trump would have done so well with Hispanic voters in Texas and Florida in 2020, essentially, taking both those states off the map in 2024?
There is no way for Democrats to know if the minstrel show of Walz will win over the critical Rust Belt voter. Because of this, all they can do is make political decisions that give them ease at night.
I will never step in Menards. So I will pick someone who I think has. At a deeper level, I believe that Walz fills a Freudian void in a party, which is definitionally dominated by women. It’s true. Just look at the demographics of the 2020 and 2022 elections. This is a very gendered campaign. Trump’s winning coalition is a pan-racial, cross-generational male base with just enough women (maybe 45%) to put him over the top.
The conventional wisdom was to balance the biracial woman of Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket with a white man at the bottom. It is strange how transparent this was. They basically announced only white men could apply. Kamala fills a maternal role who is manifesting a “Feminomenon” if we are to believe the memes. To offset this, the Democrats pick a 60-year-old white man from the rural Midwest who can play a paternal role. I am not the one saying this. Look at the branding. We are being told that Walz is “America’s dad”. You can find viral tweets today about Walz teaching people to drive stick shift without crying.
Walz plays an idealized father. He is who Democrats want the Trump voter to be, but is not. He plays a father in your mind and fills a masculine role that Democrats perceive they are missing. Just ask James Carville. Based on the RNC, Trump is doubling down on masculinity. Hulk Hogan and Dana White introduced him, but this is a form of toxic masculinity. David French of NYT Opinion said so.
Do not be fooled. The story of Tim Walz is being projected to you through a screen. Yes, Trump and Vance are too, but I have already written about Vance’s character.
This is not much different from a minstrel show. The difference is that Tim Walz doesn’t wear shoe polish for blackface. He wears 100+ SPF white sunscreen at the Minnesota State Fair and holds a piglet.