Editorial: A rural veep

Kamala Harris and the Democrats do well to have Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on their national ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. He’s rural, for real. Walz has broad appeal in Upper Midwest battleground states, is well-versed in the you-betcha vernacular, and is well-suited in Carhartt with a camo cap. The blue brand can barely be peddled along the blacktops anymore, but somehow Walz figured out a way to win a congressional seat in a red district around Mankato and ultimately the governorship.

Republicans will have a hard time defining the former master sergeant in the Army National Guard as an out-of-control elite liberal. He is an expert marksman, claims he is a better pheasant shooter than his counterpart JD Vance, and suggests that vegetarians should eat turkey since it is not really meat. He hails from West Point, Neb., from whence you can almost see South Dakota, and once got popped for drunk driving as a young school teacher and coach. (He pleaded down to reckless driving and gave up on drinking under his wife’s advice.)

Walz subscribes to the standard Democratic orthodoxy — pro-choice, supports gay rights, believes in feeding children at school, champions a living wage and backs labor unions. He is no more liberal than Hubert Humphrey (from whom Walz draws his “politics of joy” refrain) or Walter Mondale. Walz favors some gun controls, as Ronald Reagan did. Walz is more conservative than Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis. He is, in fact, pretty much your White Midwestern dad dude who coached Mankato West to a state football title.

As a congressman, Walz of course was a staunch advocate for ethanol and biodiesel, which creates immense water quality problems in Southern Minnesota and Iowa. As governor, he made way for pipelines supported by union pipefitting brethren. As vice president, he could focus attention on rural areas left behind by the bicoastal economic expansion. He could make a difference in trying to reorient agriculture toward a more diverse production system that is resilient against economic and climatic extremes. Walz can appreciate what’s happening in Worthington and Windom and West Point, and how they are not as strong as they once were.

He might even be able to get Iowa to sit up from its one-party stupor and listen. Walz’s politics of joy contrasts with our governor’s politics of exclusion, snark and denial. Walz gets a kick out of pointing out how backwards Iowa has become by banning books and bashing gays. It hurts. We know we deserve better than what we are getting from our government.

Trump has no clue what life is like in Albert Lea or Austin. JD Vance got out of rural America at the first opportunity and only looked back to condemn his country cousins in a memoir. Rural America is more than resentful people in red caps. It’s Storm Lake and first-generation college students at Buena Vista University. It’s the promise of a new energy economy with Iowa at the hub of it. It’s the complicated challenge of feeding the hungry while not despoiling the richest land in the world. It’s people with ambition and ideas held down for generations by corporate power with little regard for community.

Walz gets it. That could be a powerful antidote to the decline of political choice out here on the edge of the Great Plains. Rural communities struggling to survive need an alternative, something other than simply more tax cuts and lousy roads and rivers choking in toxins. Walz had better use that voice while he can, because Humphrey or Mondale could have told him that nobody listens to the vice president much after November.

The Harris campaign will task Walz with campaigning in Wisconsin, Michigan and western Pennsylvania. If he could make some forays into eastern Iowa it might help in a couple races key to Democrats reclaiming control of the House. Simply having a candidate on the national ticket who actually baled hay under the Nebraska sun should buck us up. Cut that Trump Iowa lead to single digits and Christina Bohannon, a Democrat, could upset Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks in the district anchored by Davenport and Iowa City. That would make a big difference in Iowa politics, if we became a two-party state again. We might be able to get some help on the Linn Grove dam or the Storm Lake water system if we actually had competing parties in this state. Oops, we just got carried away there. Sorry. Never mind. Just sayin’ … we used to have a ton more pheasants, eh? Had twice as many farmers when we were kids, too, and we got paid better. Didn’t mean to offend. Just a suggestion: We wish Walz would show up and reclaim us.