Insights About This Election from Tim Walz, Josh Shapiro and Bill Clinton
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Republicans used to brag a lot about family values, but Donald Trump cooked that turkey when the G.O.P. traded moralizing for an immoral president.
In his wake, there hasn’t been much talk in national politics about ideals, principles and conscience — that is, until Wednesday night, when Tim Walz made an awfully persuasive case for Democrats as the party of old-fashioned, small-town and, yes, conservative values, stressing the theme of neighbors looking after neighbors and especially children as the measure of a country’s humanity.
“While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banning hunger in ours,” said Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, in one of several lines that drew effusive applause from the party’s convention hall in Chicago.
“We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make,” Walz said, invoking his support for abortion rights while also noting his respect for those who hold differing views. “And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”
On one level, Walz delivered a classic running mate’s speech: He delved into his biography to introduce himself to the country (Nebraska-born, 24 in his high school class, close-knit community, then the National Guard and a career as a social studies teacher); his political beliefs (a center-left agenda focused on health care, education, gun control and a social safety net); and the case for the top of the ticket, Kamala Harris, and some shredding of Trump.
But Walz’s speech was really about something greater: a vision of a party and country that take pride in the military uniform, that show awareness for vulnerable families struggling with illness, poverty and debt, that prize the most essential workers (“never underestimate a public-school teacher” drew huge applause).
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I’ve heard quite a few running mate speeches at conventions — John Edwards, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Mike Pence, Tim Kaine, Kamala Harris — but I’ve never heard one as values-driven and down-home as Walz’s. (Edwards’s was a little like this, but far more slick.)
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all sugar and honey — he knocked Trump plenty, like saying “some folks just don’t understand what it takes to be a good neighbor.” Walz knows how to be an attack dog: Speaking of Project 2025, he drew on his football coaching days and said, “when someone takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”
But the man has a way with a speech. “We’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom,” Walz said.
It was a peroration that would make any progressive proud, but it also felt grounded in core values — dignity, humanity, privacy — that a great many Americans of all parties care about.
From my perch inside the United Center Wednesday night, I was curious to hear Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, two shrewd architects of Democratic victories, lay out the question on a lot of minds in the convention hall: how Kamala Harris wins in November.
Clinton got off some good lines about Donald Trump’s narcissism, and Pelosi struck some strong notes about the horror of Jan. 6 and the importance of abortion rights. But I didn’t hear a particularly sharp vision or vigorous message that made clear how Harris can win what her own advisers told me this week will be a tough, close race that will probably get harder soon (interviews, debates, policy fights, news media investigative stories, you name it).
But then came Josh Shapiro.
Unlike Clinton, whose voice and visage betrayed his 78 years, and Pelosi, who sped through her remarks — or, for that matter, Oprah Winfrey and other speakers — Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, got down to business fast. And he drew enormous applause and cheers from the convention hall in doing so, a burst of energy during a night that was a little too quiet a little too often for a convention.
Shapiro cast Harris as the continuation of America’s founding history in Philadelphia, part of “ordinary Americans, rising up, demanding more, seeking justice.” He wove together the themes of progress and freedom throughout his speech, and Harris as a champion of both.
“It’s not freedom to tell our children what books to read,” Shapiro said. “It’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.” Then, referring implicitly to Trump, he said, “And it sure as hell isn’t freedom to say you can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner.”
“We are the party of real freedom,” he continued, and laid out a vision of progress that included great public schools and teachers, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, clean water and voting rights.
Where other speakers emphasized vibes, Shapiro got specific. And that’s what voters in Pennsylvania want, in my experience covering elections there over the years — specifics and goals that are about them, not about emotions or vibes-driven uplift. I think Pennsylvania will be won or lost in November on the economy, trade, jobs and abortion rights — and whether Philadelphia and its suburbs turn out in enough numbers for Harris. Shapiro, a winner of three statewide elections there, knows better than most of us how to win there, and Democrats will need it to win the presidency. His speech is worth listening to on repeat.
“We value our freedom, we cherish our democracy, and we love this country,” he closed out to huge cheers. “Are you ready to protect our rights?”
“America, let’s get to work,” he concluded.
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Even now, more than three decades after Bill Clinton became a fixture on the national stage, it’s startling to be reminded of the 42nd president’s preternatural political gifts.
For the better part of an hour on Wednesday night, Clinton spoke to the Democratic National Convention’s audience of thousands as if they were a few good friends gathered in his living room. His tone was warm, relaxed, conversational, uplifting. “Aren’t you proud to be a Democrat?” he asked in nearly his first breath, and the audience was his from that moment on.
His speech did everything an elder party statesman’s speech is supposed to do, most of all by making the case for Kamala Harris and — more brilliantly — against Donald Trump. “Don’t count the lies, count the ‘I’s’” he said of the former president’s fondness for speaking about himself. “His vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.” About Trump’s management style, he aptly observed, “He creates chaos and then he sort of curates it, as if it were precious art.”
Then, toward the end of his remarks, Clinton took a more somber, admonitory — and necessary — turn. “We saw more than one election slip away from us,” he said. He warned Democrats to “never underestimate your adversary.” He reminded delegates that “there are still a lot of slips between today and Election Day that we have to navigate.”
Most important, with his wife’s politically catastrophic “basket of deplorables” remark surely in mind, he offered some much-needed advice: “As someone who spends a lot of time in small towns in rural areas in New York and Arkansas and other places, I urge you to talk to all of your neighbors, to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them.”
That’s good advice in any election cycle, but perhaps never more so than in this one. Democrats want Americans to believe that democracy itself hangs in the balance in this election. Perhaps it does, but undecided voters who recall similar dire warnings from 2016 will most likely be unimpressed. What they’ll be asking instead is how a Harris presidency will be better than the Biden one with which they weren’t altogether happy.
Almost inevitably, Clinton ended by invoking his political mythology as “the man from Hope” to pay tribute to Harris as next year’s “president of joy.” Joy is great, but what Harris needs to do is convince wavering voters that she’ll bring down their cost of living.
The New York Times
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