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CHICAGO – Tim Walz took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to the familiar chords of John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” an almost forty-year-old hit song from the era when Ronald Reagan was president and his administration’s policies were literally killing rural America. “Small Town” appeared on the 1985 album, “Scarecrow,” which featured a title track, “Rain on the Scarecrow,” that recounted the suicides of farmers forced into bankruptcy by an economic crisis that saw Reagan and his Republican allies side with big agribusiness against the people who worked the land and against the Main Street businesses that were being wiped out by Wall Street backed chain stores.
Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” Mellencamp’s rocking song was misinterpreted as another upbeat “morning in America” anthem. But it wasn’t that. It was a reminder that people still lived in the “flyover” country that was far from Wall Street and Hollywood.
Four decades after the moment when Republicans, and too many Democrats, chose to embrace the neoliberal gospel of the billionaire class – with its advocacy for “free trade” agreements, corporate consolidation, and monopoly – Walz is running for the vice presidency of the United States as a champion of what was lost. Or, perhaps, of what might be regained from an embrace of the values and ideals of the places Mellencamp fought to preserve when he sang about how “I cannot forget from where it is that I come from… I cannot forget the people who love me.”
Tim Walz does not forget where he came from. That’s why, in her shrewdest move as this year’s Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris invited Walz to be her running mate — giving the governor of Minnesota a platform to reassert those values in a race against a Republican ticket that’s led by an alleged billionaire from New York and a Yale-educated venture capitalist.
When Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance as his running mate, the former president and his marketing team imagined that – because Vance had written a lamentable book about an Appalachian region he visited on summer vacations – would lend some sort of “Small Town” authenticity to the GOP brand.
But that was always a lie.
Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, a mid-sized manufacturing city that is the kind of place to which people from small towns drive when they need to pick something up at the Walmart Supercenter.
Walz, on the other hand, is the real thing, as the governor of Minnesota was delighted to recall in his boisterous address to the Democratic delegates and to voters across the country in his Wednesday night acceptance speech.
“Now, I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people. I had 24 kids in my high school class and none of them went to Yale,” announced Walz, as the knowing crowd roared with laughter and approval for the Democrats nod to Vance’s resume.
Those sorts of references unsettle Vance, who on Wednesday night rushed to his safe place, the Fox News Channel, to attack “the dark and ominous tone” of the Walz’s speech and the whole of a convention where the governor announced that Democrats were “bringing the joy to this fight.”
The stark contrast between Vance’s dark-and-ominous view of the 2024 race versus Walz’s politics of joy will frame much of the debate this fall. There is no question that Harris and Trump, as the presidential nominees of the two major parties, will be the definitional figures in the race. But Walz and Vance are more than traditional running mates. They were each chosen with an eye toward amplifying the core themes, the values, of the campaigns.
Vance, in his book Hillbilly Elegy and in his politics, has always seen the middle of the country – which he abandoned to pursue education on the east coast and wealth on the west coast — as a stark land, where drug addiction and economic desperation stalk communities, and where the “wokeness” of “childless cat ladies” threatens to destroy what is left of the American dream.
Walz is the opposite.
He sees the America of his native Nebraska, and his adopted Minnesota, as a place where good people take care of one another. And, from that place, he brings to the national stage a politics of uplift and inclusion. After acknowledging that he and his classmates did not join J.D. Vance in the hallowed halls of New Haven, Walz said, “But I’ll tell you what, growing up in a small town like that, you’ll learn how to take care of each other that that family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they’re your neighbors and you look out for them and they look out for you. Everybody belongs and everybody has a responsibility to contribute.”
Walz recognizes that those values, like the values of the urban neighborhoods that were equally neglected by Reagan, and equally damaged by the neoliberal assault from vulture capitalists like J.D. Vance, are best renewed and advanced by a government that respects individual freedom. So it was that Walz told the delegates on Wednesday night about how, under his watch as the Democratic governor of Minnesota, “We protected reproductive freedom because, in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business!”
At the same time, Walz recognized — as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats of the era when the party swept to victory in rural America – that there is a place for an engaged and activist government that counters the worst excesses of Wall Street investment bankers and right-wing book banners.
After his election as governor in 2018, Walz recalled, “ We got right to work, making a difference in our neighbor’s lives. We cut taxes for the middle class. We passed paid family and medical leave. We invested in fighting crime and affordable housing. We cut the cost of prescription drugs and helped people escape the kind of medical debt that nearly sank my family. And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day. So, while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.”
In a convention that plenty of soaring rhetoric, Walz’s simple statement of values, with its focus on the right to read and the necessity of ending childhood poverty, and with its perfect understanding of the role and the power of government, said everything about the difference between J.D. Vance’s “dark and ominous” Republican Party and a Democratic Party that opts for freedom and joy.
