Evaluating the Attacks on Walz

Since Vice President Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate, the second-term governor has faced renewed scrutiny over his life and career. Most of the stories have appeared in some form or another in various Minnesota media over the years, but we’ve been exposed to a flood of coverage in both local and national media in the past few weeks. 

Let’s review some of the negative stories and consider how we should think about Walz in light of them, starting from most scurrilous to most legitimate. 

China’s spy

U.S. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who chairs the House Oversight Committee, is insinuating Walz is a sleeper agent because he taught in China for a year and then led student groups there; in total he visited the country some 30 times. “This is a guy that really has embraced China’s view of the world, the Chinese ideology, which is communism,” said Comer.

As Foreign Policy notes, in Congress “Walz served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights and the rule of law in the country, and co-sponsored resolutions urging the release of democratic activist Liu Xiaobo and remembering the Tiananmen Square victims.”

In other words, actions in opposition to the regime. 

Military service record

Walz served 24 years in the National Guard. At 20 years, he was entitled to retire with a pension. He has been attacked — including by a few members of his unit, though others have defended him — for retiring in 2005, knowing his unit would likely deploy to Iraq, which at the time was a nightmare war zone. 

He was running for Congress and had a young child, and he retired. There’s nothing dishonorable about retiring after you’ve put in your 20. 

Republicans are also attacking him for claiming he was in combat, based almost entirely on one comment during a 2018 gun control discussion, when Walz said he “carried a weapon of war in war.” 

The Harris-Walz campaign acknowledged he misspoke. (I’ll have more to say about Walz’s tendency to “misspeak” in a bit.) In my experience, however, actual fabulists do this kind of thing more than once and have a whole narrative of lies, whereas I never got any impression from Walz that he served in combat. 

Walz made the rank of command sergeant major; despite his claims going back to his 2006 campaign for Congress, he retired at the lesser master sergeant rank because he neglected to do some necessary coursework. (The Associated Press has an exhaustive rundown.)

The New York Times talked to four veterans who investigate claims of “stolen valor.” 

“All four said that they do not believe Walz engaged in stolen valor, but that he did misrepresent his record at times or, at the very least, has not always been precise,” the Times reported.

Worth noting: Chris LaCavita, who is the campaign manager for former President Donald Trump, is responsible for the attacks on the service record of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. 

Minneapolis burned down

To begin with, the City of Lakes did not, in fact, burn down, and it remains a great underappreciated jewel of the American Midwest (and I say that as a St. Paulite). Many of the buildings damaged or destroyed have been rebuilt, as Minneapolis photographer Chad Davis has documented, although there are lasting visible scars four years later.  

The more serious assertion is that Walz acted too slowly to restore order to the city after protests erupted into riots in the days after the police murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide reckoning, which should be a key priority for any elected official. 

The jurisdiction most responsible for restoring order was the city, not the state, and Walz referred to the city’s response as an “abject failure.” 

Mayor Jacob Frey said in August 2020 that he asked Walz to send in the National Guard, and Walz was slow to respond. Independent auditors concluded city officials didn’t follow the necessary protocols to request National Guard assistance because the process “was unfamiliar to those making the requests.”

Walz claimed that 80% of the people doing the rioting and arson were from outside Minnesota, another instance in which he “misspoke” (note the pattern).

In their defense, I can’t imagine a more challenging situation than what both Frey and Walz were confronting — needing to restore order with a police force that had lost the trust of the populace. 

Walz’s response to demonstrations outside the Brooklyn Center police station after the killing of Daunte Wright in 2021 was far more aggressive. Unlike the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, which was burned by rioters after police abandoned it, the Brooklyn Center police station remained intact, but he faced withering criticism from progressives angered by the response. 

We can only hope governing through crises prepared Walz for whatever may come as vice president and — heaven forbid — president.

Shifting DUI arrest claims 

In 1995, Walz had been drinking and watching football with friends when he was pulled over for going 96 mph in a 55 mph zone, failed a field sobriety and breath test and wound up pleading guilty to reckless driving.

The incident drove him to quit drinking, he told me in 2018, in what has become part of his political persona.

The 2006 Walz campaign — though not Walz personally — claimed he wasn’t drinking and was allowed to drive himself to the police station and then leave on his own. The campaign also claimed Walz failed a field sobriety test only because he couldn’t hear the officer’s instructions due to hearing damage related to his time as an artilleryman in the National Guard.

“The DUI charges were dropped for a reason,” campaign spokeswoman Meredith Salsbery said at the time. “The judge would not have dismissed them if there were anything to them.”

Just about everything the campaign put out about the DUI in 2006 seems to have been false, according to CNN reporting of arrest documents.

The Harris-Walz campaign has declined to comment on the discrepancy. 

It’s hard to imagine that the candidate wasn’t involved in inventing this fantastical set of lies; even if he wasn’t, he’s ultimately responsible for the words his campaign puts out. 

IVF vs. IUI

Here’s what Walz said at his introductory rally with Harris: 

“Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business. … Look, that includes IVF. And this gets personal for me and my family.” 

In fact, the Walz family children are not the result of in vitro fertilization treatments, but, rather, intrauterine insemination, or IUI.

The Harris-Walz campaign downplayed the distinction: “Governor Walz talks how normal people talk,’’ said Mia Ehrenberg, a campaign spokeswoman. “He was using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments.”

But there’s a key difference here: IUI does not entail freezing embryos, so it’s not under the same threat from anti-abortion advocates.

Walz could have said, “We tried for many years to have children and had to rely on fertility treatments. Luckily, we never had to use IVF, but we know what it’s like to struggle to have children.” 

Instead, he chose to heavily imply or at times flatly say that they had relied on IVF. The New York Times reports his own gubernatorial campaign sent out a fundraising letter that read, “My wife and I used IVF to start a family.’’

His Democratic National Convention speech was more careful, referring to “fertility treatment.” 

This isn’t the first time he has told a tall tale to leverage a political opportunity or minimize a political vulnerability, as Torey Van Oot recently reported for Axios. When he was questioned about school closures in 2022, he made the farcical claim that “over 80% of our students missed less than 10 days of in-class learning,” which referred to the 2021-2022 school year, not all the time lost at the end of the 2020 school year or 2020-2021. 

The Harris-Walz campaign’s response to Axios: Well, ya know, that’s just Walz. 

“The American people appreciate that Governor Walz tells it like it is and doesn’t talk like a politician, and they appreciate the difference between someone who occasionally misspeaks and a pathological liar like Donald Trump.” 

OK, but he should be more careful: Presidents can move markets and start and end wars with their words. 

The problem for Republicans is that the election is a binary choice, and Trump’s lies and incorrect and misleading statements number in the thousands.