The elites in the establishment media did not appear enthused about Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of radical-left Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
The selection of Walz would at first appear to excite Harris’s Democrat allies in the media, but that was not the general mood in the days following Harris’s highly anticipated announcement. “People have looked at him as the safe pick. I would disagree,” Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe said. “This opens up a number of issues for the Democratic ticket to now defend.”
Media elites wrote headlines with negative overtones about Walz’s pick throughout the week, indicating that some Democrat insiders thought it a mistake, a blunder, a self-inflicted error to chose a radical leftist from Minnesota:
- “Walz’s military record under scrutiny as Vance, GOP question his service,” the Associated Press’s Meg Kinnard reported.
- “With Walz, Harris Passes on a Chance to Redefine Herself,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn wrote.
- NBC News’s Steve Kornacki titled a story “Tim Walz’s election results don’t show a clear blue-collar boost,” providing data analysis of Walz’s shortcomings as a running mate.
- The Wall Street Journal’s Tarini Parti and Sabrina Siddiqui wrote the headline “How Shapiro Lost Out to Walz in the Race to Be Harris’s VP Pick.”
Gov. @Tim_Walz: I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt. I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war,… pic.twitter.com/3IVaXi2RP2
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 6, 2024
The media elites pointed out subtle but critical points. Walz is from a solidly blue state with a far-left record as governor, two political bases that Harris already features as the West Coast radical from California. Walz did not perform better among rural voters in Minnesota than President Joe Biden in 2020, underscoring Walz’s lack of strength among the all-important demographic that also exists in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Harris, moreover, chose Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a pro-Israel Democrat who hails from an all-important swing state, a battleground many Republicans feared could slip from their grasp with Shapiro on the ticket. Political convention suggests that Shapiro, as the governor of Pennsylvania, would dramatically help Harris win the Keystone State, but that assumption is reportedly wrong, according to Harris campaign polling.
“It’s not that I think Walz is the bad pick. It’s that there was a really good pick available and that they were afraid of their left flank, afraid of ruining the mojo,” the Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell whined.
Underscoring the media’s skepticism is another point. Anonymous Harris campaign staffers appeared to work overtime last week to redefine their candidate by allegedly retracting five of Harris’s most radical policies. That public relations battle appeared undone with the selection of Walz, a Democrat governor with a record that mirrors Harris’s.
“She is in a toss-up environment, and every inch counts,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chair said. “Does Walz help her gain those inches? I don’t believe he does.”
The most serious line of attack against Walz opened up on Wednesday. Accusations of stolen valor plagued Walz’s first week as Harris’s running mate after a video surfaced of him misrepresenting his military career by falsely claiming he served in war. The Harris campaign escalated the stolen valor scandal on Thursday by scrubbing its reference to Walz’s rank.
“Walz did make a comment, speaking to a group — he’s done it a couple of times, where he has used language that suggested that he carried weapons in a fighting situation,” CNN correspondent Tom Foreman said, fact checking Walz’s claims.
“There is a difference between being in a combat area, being involved in a time of war, and actually being in a position where people are shooting at you,” Foreman explained. “[There] is no evidence that at any time Governor Walz was in the position of being shot at, and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest that he was. So that is absolutely false when he said that about gun rights out there.”
RELATED — CNN’s Zeleny: We’ll See if Walz Answers Questions on Military Record, ‘If He Ever Takes Questions’
“It’s conceivable he’s been loose with his language,” CNN’s Van Jones said. “If he needs to clean it up, clean it up.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
