CHICAGO — The cardinal rule of football, or being a vice presidential candidate, is don’t do anything that hurts the team.
And Coach Tim Walz showed Wednesday night that he can run that play to perfection.
It was a Democratic National Convention “gettin’ to know ya” for 20,000 or so cheering fans in the United Center, where the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks play their home games. That it was held in a sports arena was appropriate.
The night’s most inescapable conclusion was that Walz was a darn fine high school football coach.
In case you didn’t get that the first 50 or so times it was said out loud, you could have pieced it together from the 15 of his former players who preceded him on the stage, in their football jerseys and dad bods.
The Coach Walz persona is like the coach you wish you’d had in high school — friendly, helpful and inspirational.
Your experience may vary, but most of mine yelled at us a lot and seemed kind of perpetually angry, probably because they had to teach driver’s ed several periods a day to stay on the school payroll.
The policy section of Walz’s speech was thin, more or less a quick recitation of some regular Democratic talking points: tax cuts for the middle class instead of billionaires, affordable housing, lower prices for pharmaceuticals, and a “mind your own damn business” approach to other people’s abortions and same-sex personal relationships.
I didn’t stopwatch the speech, but I’d say rough estimate, it was about 30% politics and policy, and 70% pep rally.
It was short — about 15 minutes or so. And that’s not a bad thing. Walz’s speech won’t go down in history — and nobody’s writing their doctoral dissertation on the history of former football coaches’ remarks upon the occasion of accepting the nomination for vice president of the United States.
The main takeaway is that it was fun.
After the roller-coaster year they’ve had, the Democratic Party was overdue for some of that.
If Coach Walz (who’s also a former congressman and the current governor of Minnesota, BTW) can keep this up for the rest of this campaign, he has a better than average chance of moving into the Naval Observatory in Washington come January.
The keynote speakers the first three nights of the convention set the stage for the main event Thursday, when Vice President Kamala Harris was to make her own case for why she should be president.
If Harris can match the poignancy of President Biden’s farewell to national politics (Monday), the surgical precision of Michelle Obama’s dismantling of Donald Trump, and Barack Obama’s eloquence in calling on us to be our best selves (Tuesday), and Tim Walz’s just plain folksiness (Wednesday), she should be in pretty decent shape.
