Its seven days out from the election andTim Walzstill knows who he is.
(Fact check: both true.)
We are now in the Blur City portion of the campaign.
Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz speaks to the crowd at a rally in Savannah, Georgia.Andrew Hetherington for Rolling Stone
History remembers the pop in.
JFK was the son of an ambassador hell-bent on one of his offspring occupying the White House.
Al Gore was a senators son.
(I didnt say they all won.)
Dude was already an operator at 12.
That is not the Tim Walz story.
We sit at a long worktable where a Diet Mountain Dew awaits him.
Walzs eyes light up.
I say he thought the series tailed off with book three.
Yeah, everyone says that, says Walz, his remaining silver hair trimmed neatly.
He tugs at an ear, a nervous tic that you could see when he is giving a speech.
He is genuinely bummed.
Yeah, I think they could have been much better.
You will not find this in another candidates origin story.
Id say Well, someday, Pat, when Im president of this country, heres what well do.
She Says We’re Not Done Yet
He exhales.
Yeah, and then to be here.
Walz trails off for a moment.
He gives a hopeful smile.
Like, this system still works.
We will see in a few days.
A political campaign can do that to a man.
Walz rose from Gopher State obscurity on such a nugget.
This summer, he called Trump and J.D.
Vance and their desire to stick their fingers in the personal lives of Americans as just weird onMorning Joe.
(Someday, historians will ponder whether just weird begat J.D.
Vance fucked a couch, but Ill leave that for future generations).
But thats not exactly true.
He gives off big Nick Offerman energy.
The 60-year-old has neither money nor property nor Ivy League connections all pluses in 2024.
(Walz does have a teachers and a National Guard pension for his dotage.
Ask your grandparents.)
Walz, as they say, checks all the boxes.
He has been a teacher, a football coach, and a longtime National Guardsman.
Oh, yeah, and most everyone who has met him considers him to be a good guy.
This being America, the backlash was immediate.
Walz enlisted in the National Guard at 17 and served with distinction from 1981 to 2005.
(Walz retired two months before his unit was notified of their deployment.)
Other Walz assets were turned into junk bonds.
We want a regular guy, but notthatregular!
His many trips to China as both a student and teacher was evidence that he was a Chinese toady.
More chilling was the right wing attacking his male bona fides.
Did he coach a state champion team at Mankato West High School?
Yeah, but he wasnt the head coach, he was just a defensive coordinator.
Im just trying to be who I am, Walz says.
And its interesting to me, they make a run at nitpick these things.
Im like, Why would you spend time on that?
Coming at me on this issue thinking its an insult that we provide feminine hygiene projects in our schools.
I dont think thats the flex they think it is.
Why would an adult not be there to try and care?
Leadership means stepping up and helping.
I did flash a little anger there, but the universe corrects this.
The whole country has wrapped their arms around [him], says Walz with a big smile.
This despite the fact he has been hunting and shooting clay pigeons for decades.
(Heresan actual accountby a reporter who was at the hunt.)
The criticism directed at Walz was coming from a bitter place.
Walz passed background-check legislation in 2023 and signed it into law with Gabby Giffords by his side.
Walz likes to quip there is a reason Trump is against background checks.
The Republican nominee cant pass a background check.
Joe Biden became VP and then president after his 1988 campaign flamed out because he plagiarized a speech.
Bill Clinton won despite Gennifer Flowers and a decade of general sketchiness.
Tucker Carlson went as far to question the governors sexuality.
Tim Walz is very obviously gay, said Carlson, a frozen-food heir with a shrieking laugh.
I look at him and Im like, Well, youre gay.
Asked for proof, Carlson offered the fact that Walz does jazz hands when he greets a crowd.
Walz had to learn to be that man on his own.
His elderly mother was in the audience.
My dad was a Korean War-era veteran.
I watched as my mom struggled enormously to pay outstanding medical bills and keep the family together.
Its a story he tells often on the campaign trail to explain the importance of a social safety net.
Early in our conversation, I ask Walz why he mentions the specifics of his dads death.
Its interesting you would ask that, Walz says.
Its probably a little bit psychological, being bitter towards that.
Bitterness toward the tobacco industry.
He was first in his family to go to college.
He was a superintendent of schools, but he certainly had his faults.
For a few minutes, Walz talks about his parents.
My dad was stoic but kind.
He was at all our sporting events.
My mom was the quintessential stay-at-home mom.
Years later, she said, I wished I wouldve been able to go do this, or whatever.
Walz smiles a bit.
I think, to be honest with you, he was doing it for the money.
My mom tells me that.
But I think he was also saying, If Im going out, Im going out this way.
Im a math teacher, and thats what I do.
James Walz died in 1984.
Bereft, Walz wandered America through his twenties.
(His late brother Craig was a teacher as well.)
He says his teaching approach is fairly simple.
I never went back and looked at what a kid had done before, Walz says.
They came in as a clean slate, and the kids knew that.
I think I treated them each as individuals.
I treated them each as the most special thing.
Gwen and Tim married in 1994 and moved to Mankato two years later.
He taught geography and supervised the lunchroom while coaching football.
Gwen taught English and was thought to be the more politically active of the couple.
They bought a house on a quiet side street with the help of a VA loan.
I had the basement, Walz says.
The experience crystallizedthe importance of reproductive rightsin his mind.
Look, in that case, it was the kids showing courage, Walz tells me.
My role was basically validating their position.
I didnt have to put a lot of thought into it.
I gave them a room.
It was the right thing for these kids, they needed me to be there.
Walz adds that being a football coach added heft to his influence.
Walz gives a dad frown.
Enough reality, lets get back to the show.
All the worlds a stage, nowhere more than a presidential campaign.
Its a late October night in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the trees are ablaze in autumn colors.
This is the kind of a rally you might see in a picture book or aWest Wingreboot.
Vance and Alex Jones.
That isnt the scene here.
He beams like a man who has just been announced as the next contestant onThe Price Is Right.
Walz waves with abandon, occasionally giving some sort of hands-clasped-together namaste motion of thanks.
Shouts of Coach, Coach ring out.
Their lives are at stake in this election.
The crowd cheers and stamps their feet.
Harris gives him some props.
And let me tell you why I love Coach Walz.
At no point does Harris refer to him as Governor Walz.
After she finishes speaking, Harris and Walz wave and shake hands.
We talk the next morning.
He smiles and looks toward the windows covered in Coach signs.
I appreciate you asking the question, he says.
Im curious about how things work.
I really put myself into that.
He pauses for a moment.
And its a little less intimidating to them if it comes to them as a coach.
An hour later, Walz is speaking to the Savannah gathering.
Two minutes left on the clock.
The good news is, weve got the damn ball.
Iconfess that I fell into the Walz stereotype of Governor Rah Rah/Americas Dad at the start of my research.
Then I did a dangerous thing; I started listening to podcasts.
He won his last congressional term in 2016 by less than a point.
How do they work together?
He is more expansive on his pandemic experience.
My leadership style is collaborative and listening to the experts, Walz says.
This is what you should do.
And then be able to go back afterwards if theres some assessments to try and do better.
He suggests that the fervor of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers caught him by surprise.
Unfortunately, during the pandemic there were only really bad outcomes and bad outcomes.
Walz was reelected in 2022 and the results since then have been a happier story.
The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party held both houses and the governors mansion for the first time in decades.
Tim used to pay off the lunch bills of kids who couldnt afford them, Frentz says.
He then tells me a story from his congressional years.
In 2010, the Affordable Care Act bill, a.k.a.
Obamacare, came up for a vote.
In a swing district like his, support for the ACA was tenuous at best.
Walz called in his staff for a talk.
And to their credit, my staff said, We get it.
Lets go for it.
Walz did not go back to teaching school.
I had coffee in St. Paul with Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman a week before I talked with Walz.
Hortman is a formidable politician and one of Walzs partners in passing the Minnesota Miracle legislation.
This is a guy who works incredibly well as a team member with strong women, said Hortman.
Hortman wondered for a moment if anything she said was useful to me.
She then became succinct.
Look, the reason people really like Tim is because hes a very decent human being.
And now its time to address the white male voter in the room.
Well, I know people spend a lot of time on this, Walz says.
I come at this from just how I grew up and the things I did.
And it appears like its a very bullying way of going about things rather than empowering.
A handler suggests we are out of time, but Walz wants to finish his thought.
Theyre trying to pigeonhole people into saying, This is what a man in 2024 looks like.
And I think it is untrue.
I think its dangerous because its splitting us on things we shouldnt.
Im like, Well, why would you spend time on that?
I hole up in Savannah to write this.
I FaceTime with my 10-year-old between the moments of inspiration and despair.
That leads to some talk about right-wing criticism of Walz for not being the right kind of mans man.
Im confident that Tim Walz would agree with that.
