‘Let’s Go for It’: Tim Walz Eyes the End Zone

I
t’s seven days out from the election and Tim Walz still knows who he is. In the past week, Walz has called Elon Musk a “dipshit” in the presence of Barack Obama, cleaned up Joe Biden’s “garbage” remarks on the morning television shows, played video games with AOC, and internally raged about a fake AI video calling him a pedophile. He has forsaken his own Christian name and professional title, and his birth certificate may very well read “Coach.” He has hit all seven swing states in eight days calling Donald Trump old, Nazi-ish, and the carnival barker of a decidedly un-American approach to democracy, including but not limited to his hateful Madison Square Garden rally and tanking a bipartisan immigration bill for political purposes. (Fact check: both true.) 

We are now in the Blur City portion of the campaign. The embedded reporters are being fed cookies for dinner on the fourth flight of the day, and I wake up thinking we are in Charleston when in fact we are in Savannah.

The road kind of sucks, but this is what the ambitious little boys and girls who dream of being president and VP imagine while cranking through Model UN and debate at prep school and simultaneously applying for White House internships.

History remembers the type. JFK was the son of an ambassador hell-bent on one of his offspring occupying the White House. Al Gore was a senator’s son. (I didn’t say they all won.) Even the hardscrabble upbringing of Bill Clinton features a photo of the Arkansas boy shaking JFK’s hand at a Boys State event. Dude was already an operator at 12. Hell, Joe Biden and Donald Trump had been talking about and/or running for the presidency for a lifetime before they actually won the office.

That is not the Tim Walz story.

The governor and I are talking in an upstairs room at the Victory North Building in Savannah, where security has taped “Coach” signs over the windows so as not to give a potential sniper an unobstructed view from a nearby building. Walz has four rallies in two states today but has made time for me and my new best friends, four staffers who loom 15 feet away. We sit at a long worktable where a Diet Mountain Dew awaits him. I start by telling him that my 10-year-old son is reading the Mortal Engines books after Walz said in an interview he read them with his son, Gus. Walz’s eyes light up.

“What did he think?”

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 can see when he is giving a speech. “The problem is the first one bombed as a movie so we don’t get another one, which is a shame.” He is genuinely bummed. “Yeah, I think they could have been much better.”

We talk a bit about the campaign — more on that later — but I wonder aloud whether, before he spoke at the Democratic convention in Chicago or the vice presidential debate in Philadelphia, he had that David Byrne “how did I get here?” moment. He smiles and shrugs a bit before telling me a story from his days as a geography teacher and lunchroom monitor at Mankato West High School in Minnesota. You will not find this in another candidate’s origin story.

“I can remember, I’m years into my teaching career, playing Isaac Asimov trivia out of the paper, down with the teachers in the lounge,” says Walz with a smile that toggles between nostalgia and sadness. “I remember Pat Flynn was the grand guy, the old teacher, the curmudgeon, and he and I would joke together about the world. I’d say ‘Well, someday, Pat, when I’m president of this country, here’s what we’ll do.’ Because that’s who we were.’”

He exhales.

“Yeah, and then to be here.”

Walz trails off for a moment.

“I’m hearing it from teachers and others, the idea that you can do this without money,” says Walz, who currently owns neither a home nor possesses a stock portfolio. He gives a hopeful smile. A moment later, he adds, “I do it with a sense of gratitude, but I also do it with a sense of wonder for others. Like, this system still works.”

We will see in a few days.

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he boy from nowhere story is a classic literary trope — the male version of the Cinderella story as narrated by Bill Murray. But both Pip from Great Expectations and Puck on The Real World taught us long ago the hero’s journey isn’t all homemade beef jerky, one of Walz’s favorite foods. The qualities that propel our protagonist — altruistic humility turning to ambition — are the same ones that can bring him to his knees.

A political campaign can do that to a man. The whole process is all about reduction, reducing candidates and their ideas to bite-size morsels that can be consumed between NFL games and Golden Bachelorette commercial breaks. 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” on Morning Joe. The fact that the line was being delivered by a regular guy who went to Chadron State and not Princeton gave it the ring of authenticity, a commodity rare in politics. Quickly, variations on the “weird” meme became as omnipresent as the “Here Comes the Boom” guys, which is both a hilarious and depressing comment on — putting on my NPR voice — the American political discourse. “They’re weird” became the political-sitcom catchphrase of our time, uttered by Democratic politicians including the ones who wanted to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ No. 2. (Someday, historians will ponder whether “just weird” begat “J.D. Vance fucked a couch,” but I’ll leave that for future generations). The fact that the line’s creator was a former six-term congressman and governor who had just passed the most progressive agenda in Minnesota history was nice, but sort of irrelevant. You didn’t have to be a rube or a Republican to think Harris chose Walz to be her running mate simply because of a quip.

But that’s not exactly true. Harris settled on Walz not only because of the weird thing, but because he represented the closest thing the Democratic Party has to a political whisperer to the American white working man, a demographic that makes Trump a viable presidential candidate and not just a late-night punch line. (Trump won the white working-class vote in 2020 with 59 percent, slightly less than his margin over Hillary Clinton in 2016.) This has been supremely frustrating to Democrats since Trump is no working-class hero — he hates unions and Obamacare, has a gold toilet, and wears makeup that makes him look like a microwaved pumpkin pie.

Enter Tim Walz. 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 teacher’s and a National Guard pension for his dotage. What’s a pension? Ask your grandparents.)

Walz, as they say, checks all the boxes. He has been a teacher, a football coach, and a longtime National Guardsman. Before being elected governor of Minnesota, he had long represented a pasty white congressional district, with the kind of rural voters Harris needs to win back — at least a teeny slice — if she wants to become America’s first woman president.

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. Critics claimed that Walz’s retirement to run for Congress a few months before his unit deployed to the Persian Gulf was a betrayal of his men. The accusation was debunked when Walz ran for governor but was revived by Republicans looking for a potential “swift boat”-style smear like the one they used to denigrate John Kerry’s Vietnam service during the 2004 campaign. (Walz retired two months before his unit was notified of their deployment.) He reached the rank of command sergeant major toward the end of his service, and some of his early campaign literature touted that fact. Alas, he had not served enough time or completed the requisite training to retire as a command sergeant major so he officially retired as a master sergeant. When asked about his history of misstatements, specifically his claim that he had been in Hong Kong at the time of Tiananmen Square when he didn’t arrive until months later, Walz shrugged and said, “I’m a knucklehead at times,” which was both funny and not exactly exculpatory. 

Other Walz assets were turned into junk bonds. No stock portfolio? We want a regular guy, but not that regular! 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 wasn’t the head coach, he was just a defensive coordinator. As governor, Walz passed kid-friendly legislation that gave free school lunches and breakfasts to all students, and a measure that made tampons available to students. This made him “Tampon Tim” to the guys who would rather be castrated than go to the CVS and buy their girlfriend some Tampax. I will tell you that nothing will kill your belief in American exceptionalism like seeing a middle-aged man in Wisconsin protesting a Walz speech by holding a giant papier-mâché tampon that clearly took him hours to construct and still does not look very absorbent.

“I’m just trying to be who I am,” Walz says. “And it’s interesting to me, they try to nitpick these things. I’m like, ‘Why would you spend time on that?’ Coming at me on this issue thinking it’s an insult that we provide feminine hygiene projects in our schools. I don’t think that’s the flex they think it is. Why would an adult not be there to try and care? Leadership means stepping up and helping.”

Walz tells me that the only time he got angry about the attacks was when some cruelsters online made fun of his teenage son Gus for weeping happily when his father was announced at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“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.

The foolishness reached a crescendo this fall when Walz, a longtime hunter, took members of the press out into the fields of Minnesota for the first day of pheasant season. According to various armchair hunters, Walz was using the wrong gun, did not know how to load said gun, and was a complete fraud. This despite the fact he has been hunting and shooting clay pigeons for decades. (Here’s an actual account by a reporter who was at the hunt.) The criticism directed at Walz was coming from a bitter place. Walz went from an A rating from the NRA to an F after the 2018 Parkland High School shooting changed his mind about the need to ban assault weapons and establish background checks. 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 can’t pass a background check. You go into Cabela’s and fill out the form and it comes back with 34 felonies; they tell you to get the hell out,” he said at a rally.

In my lifetime, I have seen Dan Quayle serve as vice president despite not being able to spell “potato.” 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. And Trump? Well, Donald has a 50-50 chance of being our next president despite instigating a Capitol insurrection, being impeached twice, being the subject of several credible accusations of sexual abuse, and is now a convicted felon. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance, Walz’s counterpart, who once said Trump had Hitler-like tendencies, holds a Senate seat bought for him by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, whose attitude about democracy suggests nostalgia for his South African boyhood.

In that context, Walz’s sins are minor, which suggests that his greatest offense was offering an alternative to the “fuck your feelings” Trump white-guy ideology that is best repped by the once-balding and now magically-haired Elon Musk spreading misinformation and hatred toward anyone who doesn’t agree with his retro view of masculinity. Tucker Carlson went as far to question the governor’s sexuality.

“Tim Walz is very obviously gay,” said Carlson, a frozen-food heir with a shrieking laugh. “I look at him and I’m like, ‘Well, you’re gay.’” Asked for proof, Carlson offered the fact that Walz does jazz hands when he greets a crowd.

So why is all this irrational firepower being directed toward a guy who went to a no-name college, definitely has not had a hair transplant, and looks like he might let you slide in front of him at Target if you just had one item?

It’s simple. Women like him. 

W

alz had to learn to be that man on his own. In 2019, Walz gave his first inauguration speech as Minnesota governor and talked about growing up in Valentine, Nebraska, a dot of a town just a few miles from the South Dakota state line. His elderly mother was in the audience.

“We lived in a small town, as many of you know, about 400 people or so, and when my dad died, I watched my mom work tirelessly to hold our family together,” Walz said. “My dad was a Korean War-era veteran. He was an educator, and he was a four-pack-a-day smoker who died of lung cancer when I was a teenager and my little brother was eight. I watched as my mom struggled enormously to pay outstanding medical bills and keep the family together. We got by on Social Security, survivor benefits, and my mom’s job working as an aide in a nursing home.”

It’s 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 dad’s death.

“It’s interesting you would ask that,” Walz says. “It’s probably a little bit psychological, being bitter towards that. Bitterness toward the tobacco industry. He was addicted. He was accomplished. 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 would’ve been able to go do this, or whatever.’ But I think, for him, it was just do the job; he served in the military, never talked much about it.”

Walz smiles a bit.

“After he left his superintendent job because he couldn’t continue with being that sick, he went back in his final months and taught math. 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 I’m going out, I’m going out this way. I’m a math teacher, and that’s what I do.’”

James Walz died in 1984. Bereft, Walz wandered America through his twenties. He moved to Houston and joined the Texas National Guard before moving on to build suntanning beds in Houston and Jonesboro, Arkansas. He eventually returned to Nebraska and attended Chadron State College where he set on becoming a teacher like his father. (His late brother Craig was a teacher as well.) Walz graduated in 1989 and spent a year teaching in China before landing at a school in Alliance, Nebraska, where he met his wife, Gwen. 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 made a trip to Mankato to take a look, and the house, sold when the Walzes moved into the governor’s mansion, is quintessentially middle-class nice, maybe 1,700 square feet.

“I had the basement,” Walz says. “My buddy and I, a National Guard guy, put up wood paneling down there, and with my first football check, I bought a big-screen TV.”

After years of struggle, the couple had two children, Hope and Gus, with the help of IUI fertility treatments. (Walz was excoriated by the right-wing media for mistakenly saying the couple used IVF, a mistake that I, also a fertility-aided dad, have made myself.) The experience crystallized the importance of reproductive rights in his mind. Walz has always been an ardent supporter of gay marriage and an opponent of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy, and his roots as an ally of the gay community go back to the 1990s at Mankato West. A gay student was being bullied, and Walz was asked to be a faculty adviser to the school’s new Gay-Straight Alliance.

“Look, in that case, it was the kids showing courage,” Walz tells me. “My role was basically validating their position. I didn’t 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. It’s not like there was a lot of pushback in the teacher lounge; it was more ‘OK, I did it and that’s done.’”

Walz adds that being a football coach added heft to his influence. I mention that starting a gay-straight alliance at a high school today would probably be more fraught now then it was in the 1990s with school board recalls, online shitposting, and doxing on the menu. Walz gives a dad frown.

“Isn’t that sad?”

E

nough reality, let’s get back to the show. All the world’s a stage, nowhere more than a presidential campaign. It’s a late October night in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the trees are ablaze in autumn colors. Fifteen thousand or so Harris-Walz supporters are gathered for the utopian idea of a political rally, including the acoustic stylings of Maggie Rogers.

This is the kind of a rally you might see in a picture book or a West Wing reboot. Trust me. I had spent much of September and October covering various dispiriting right-wing public gatherings from Trump rallies in Bozeman, Montana, and the Butler, Pennsylvania, reunion speech and Carlson’s road-show stops with J.D. Vance and Alex Jones. One weekend, I hit RFK Jr.’s Rescue the Republic conspiracy-pallooza in Washington, D.C., featuring so many angry guys from Broken Toy Island. While all the events had their own special serotonin-crushing moments, they shared a universal “America sucks” vibe that no amount of molly could have relieved.

That isn’t the scene here. Rogers’ songs are beautiful, and no one in the crowd turns to the media and gives us the double middle finger while screaming “fuck you.” As night falls, Walz is introduced and he walks a long catwalk toward the podium past all the Secret Service personnel who had to put on ties because the vice president is here. He beams like a man who has just been announced as the next contestant on The 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. 

He speaks for about 15 minutes, touching on his life experiences as a hunter and then tormenting Trump a bit, but the message in the final days is an appeal to women feeling threatened by the loss of Roe v. Wade and promises from Daddy Trump that he will “protect” them, “whether the women like it or not.”

“This is for the men, all of you have those women in your life that you love — daughters, partners, sisters, friends, neighbors, colleagues, whoever it might be,” says Walz. “Their lives are at stake in this election. Be very clear about that and be very clear about this: When Congress restores the right to choose, making Roe the law of the land, Kamala Harris will proudly sign it into law.”

The crowd cheers and stamps their feet. I do notice one thing, and I apologize in advance for pissing in anyone’s Cheerios, but I do not see a ton of guys in Carhartt and trucker caps for Walz to convert to righteousness. No matter. A minute later, he calls out Vice President Harris and jogs off the stage with the purpose of, well, a football coach hell-bent to get to the locker room and make halftime adjustments.

Harris gives him some props.

“Tim Walz, he’s been such an extraordinary running mate, and he will be an extraordinary vice president of the United States,” says Harris, flanked on both sides of the podium by bulletproof glass. “And let me tell you why I love Coach Walz. As he travels to every corner of our country, meeting with people in small towns, big towns, towns everywhere in between, Coach Walz is always bringing the joy.”

At no point does Harris refer to him as Governor Walz. After she finishes speaking, Harris and Walz wave and shake hands. Walz is having such a great time, Harris has to give him a “Uh, Tim, we gotta go, it’s a school night” nudge.

We talk the next morning. I ask Walz if it bugs him that he has been reduced to a stock character of “Coach,” the political equivalent of the affable neighbor on a sitcom who never gets his own plotline. He smiles and looks toward the windows covered in “Coach” signs.

“I appreciate you asking the question,” he says. “I’m curious about how things work. When I left Congress, I think I was the nation’s leading expert on the VA and VA policy; and we moved things together, and I think Republicans would agree with that. I really put myself into that.” He pauses for a moment. “But I think sometimes that policy stuff, if you lead with that, it kind of gets in the way. So, I would acknowledge living that life, understanding it, and then I kind of approach it as, ‘How do you explain it to people?’ And it’s 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, we’ve got the damn ball.”

Everyone cheers.

I

confess that I fell into the Walz stereotype of Governor Rah Rah/America’s Dad at the start of my research. Then I did a dangerous thing; I started listening to podcasts. Walz’s appearance with Ezra Klein included so much talk about the inefficiency of means testing in a free school-lunch program that I had to pound 20 ounces of cold brew to survive it.

The story goes that Walz only became political after he took some students to a 2004 presidential rally for George W. Bush and were turned away because one of his kids was wearing a “Kerry for President” button. Two years later, he defeated an entrenched Republican incumbent and spent his time in Congress concentrating on VA and farm issues as a Blue Dog Democrat, a now largely extinct brand of moderate Democrat. His victory margins shrank over the years not so much because of Walz’s performance but the Democratic Party’s hemorrhaging the white male vote through the Tea Party years and the rise of Trump. He won his last congressional term in 2016 by less than a point. Astutely, he ditched the seat and ran for governor in 2018, winning a multi-candidate primary and the general election.

His first term was haunted by both the Covid-19 pandemic and the fiery protests and riots in May 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by policeman Derek Chauvin. Walz was hugely sympathetic to the cries of police brutality but was criticized by some — although he was praised by Trump — for waiting to call in the National Guard. His administration initially laid that decision at the doorstep of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who said he was wary of introducing the military into an already chaotic situation.

Walz eventually activated 7,000 National Guardsmen, but by then scenes of burning buildings and chaos had been broadcast worldwide. I ask Walz about the twin crises and what he learned from them that he could apply to his potential term as vice president. His answer on the Floyd protests is the only time in our conversation where he resorts to word salad about intergovernmental coordination.

“I think for many of us [the question] to say is what were the policies in place ahead of time,” says Walz. “How do you anticipate it and how do you start preplanning for things to anticipate how these work because there’s levels of local, state, federal [involvement]. How do they work together?”

He is more expansive on his pandemic experience. Like many Midwest governors, he was alternately supported and pilloried for walking the line between protecting public health and the demands of restless citizens who carped about closed schools and masking requirements.

“My leadership style is collaborative and listening to the experts,” Walz says. “I was blessed to be able to have the Mayo Clinic, and I was blessed to have military personnel who understood these things. I’ve always done this: Surround myself with people who are empowered to say, ‘Look, I don’t think that’s the right way to go. This is what you should do.’ And then be able to go back afterwards if there’s some assessments to try and do better.”

He suggests that the fervor of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers caught him by surprise.

“I think the American public is so conditioned in situations that there is either a good outcome or a bad outcome,” Walz says. “Unfortunately, during the pandemic there were only really bad outcomes and bad outcomes. I wished I would’ve sensed that they were going to spread misinformation because I think the vast majority of people would’ve come around to us, but it was moving so quickly.”

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 governor’s mansion for the first time in decades. In his second inauguration speech, Walz said that his ambition was nothing less than the eradication of child poverty and making Minnesota the best place in the country to raise children. The expansive legislation passed a few months later was rightfully dubbed the “Minnesota Miracle” by his staff and featured expanded family and medical leave, protection of abortion rights, child tax credits for low-income families, a billion-dollar investment in low-income housing, and free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota students.

“I know the lunch program meant a lot to Tim,” says state Sen. Nick Frentz as he drives me around Mankato on a brilliant October afternoon. “Tim used to pay off the lunch bills of kids who couldn’t afford them,” Frentz says. “He wanted it to be free for everyone, with no stigma or different color tickets for free lunches because he found kids were embarrassed to use them.”

Back in Savannah, Walz says his decisions were simply about doing the right thing and not worrying about future political blowback.

“You don’t win elections to bank political capital and get reelected, you win elections to burn political capital, improve lives,” Walz tells me. “And the Minnesota Miracle was just an extension for many of us, me in particular, of policies that improved our lives. These were things that I knew not only improved lives, they made our economy stronger and our communities better.”

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.

“I had my team together and I said there is no doubt we are voting for the ACA,” Walz remembers. “I’m pretty certain we’ll probably lose because of the way these things are going, but I am more than willing to go back to teaching school. And to their credit, my staff said, ‘We get it. Let’s 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 Walz’s partners in passing the Minnesota Miracle legislation. She told me Walz was adept at using the bully pulpit of the governor’s office to get their message across, but then got the hell out of the way and let the legislators do their job.

“This is a guy who works incredibly well as a team member with strong women,” said Hortman. “How many extremely policy-wonky guys are relatable to the average guy going to the football game on Friday night, the average activist on a college campus about environmental issues, and is also a full and strong and decent partner to the people that he’s working with under very stressful situations?”

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 he’s a very decent human being.”

A

nd now it’s time to address the white male voter in the room. Let’s get real, no voting group has been more coddled and courted than pale skins like me who — don’t tell anyone — already hold most of the power in the United States, the world, and, if Musk has it way, on the planet Mars. The conventional wisdom is that a vice presidential nominee doesn’t sway votes even when someone like Walz had the highest approval ratings of the four national candidates for much of the summer.

We’re talking 160 hours before Election Day polls open, and I hardly expect Walz to launch into a treatise about the failure of Democrats to connect with white guys without college degrees; if he did I’m pretty sure one of his handlers would pull the fire alarm. I do ask him if he’s distressed by the way Republicans have framed the ideal white guy as cocky, confident, and completely lacking the empathy gene while thoughtful men are derided as sexless cucks.

“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. I do think it’s unfortunate that there is an attempt by marketers or folks on the other side to try and tell you what masculinity is. And it appears like it’s a very bullying way of going about things rather than empowering. I think the biggest thing for me has always been empowering other people to do the best that they can do.”

A handler suggests we are out of time, but Walz wants to finish his thought.

“They’re trying to pigeonhole people into saying, ‘This is what a man in 2024 looks like.’ And I think it is untrue. I think it’s dangerous because it’s splitting us on things we shouldn’t. I’m like, ‘Well, why would you spend time on that?’ And the part of the problem that gets me on this is they’re spending time doing that and meanwhile, ‘What’s your plan for childcare?’”

Walz shakes my hand, gives his speech, and then heads off to Columbus, Georgia, Asheville, North Carolina, and a dozen more places where he will give his coach talk using metaphors about marching down the field toward victory on Nov. 5. I hole up in Savannah to write this. I FaceTime with my 10-year-old between the moments of inspiration and despair. We talk mostly about our fantasy football team — Patrick Mahomes is seriously letting us down — and how he doesn’t want to practice the guitar, but in our conversations I share with him Walz’s opinion on Mortal Engines. That leads to some talk about right-wing criticism of Walz for not being the right kind of man’s man.

My boy pauses for a second.

“I think everyone should just be who they want to be.”

I’m confident that Tim Walz would agree with that.