How Did "Tampon Tim" Happen?

Somewhere between 24 and 48 hours after Kamala announced she'd selected Minnesota Gov Tim Walz as her running mate, it looks like any possible advantage he might have brought to the ticket evaporated. Even that paragon of obtuseness Sean Trende scratched his head at Real Clear Politics:

There are basically three good reasons to make a vice-presidential selection. The first is to help deliver a key state in which the vice-presidential candidate resides. The second is to help counteract a narrative developing about the candidate. The third is to calm a restive base.

. . . Vance did none of these things. The same is true of Walz.

Wait a moment. This is what they teach you in middle school civics class, and Trende thinks he's some sort of big-deal pundit? He goes on for another 750 words or so about how Kelly or Shapiro would have been better choices and concludes,

Regardless, I don’t think Walz probably leaves Harris all that much worse off. He’s more of a missed opportunity, given the alternatives.

But let's detour into what he thought of Vance pn July 15. He repeated the middle-school commonplace of what a running mate adds to a ticket and concluded Trump

picked J.D. Vance, a vice-presidential candidate who adds absolutely nothing to the ticket. In fact, he might make things more difficult for Trump.

Except that Vance, a former Marine who served in combat in Iraq, has been the face of the swift boat 2.0 campaign against Walz. At the link,

“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him – a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with,” said Trump running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. A Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, Vance added, “I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through, and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.”

As of yesterday, Sean Trende still thought Vance brought nothing to the ticket. It seems to me that Trump was almost clairvoyant in the role Vance could possibly play against Kamala's eventual choice, but I think this stems from Trump's instinctive recognition of Vance's overall abilities. He's thinking of Vance as someone with multiple positives outside a particular stage of a campaign who could potentially be a successor down the road, and so far, I think he's been right.

But let's go back to how things have turned out for Walz. Stephen Kruiser's take:

When they went with one of the least strategically sound choices they had for the Number Two spot, I knew that my fear of the DNC turning into a well-oiled machine before the election wasn't going to be realized.

. . . Tim Walz is a target-rich candidate for mockery. The more that undecided voters learn about him, the less there is to like. The coastal Democrats don't care about stolen valor — Dick Blumenthal is the senior senator from Connecticut, after all. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that is going to play well with the voters that the Democrats should be going after, which brings back to why I think this is more flailing on their part.

. . . The addition of Tim Walz to the ticket just keeps things nice and insular. Joe and Martha Swingvoter in Flyover Country, USA aren't looking at Walz and thinking, "That's what I've been waiting for from the Democrats!" They're still flailing; they're just smiling a lot more while they are doing it.

Stephen Green at Instapundit echoes my take from yesterday:

One explanation, of course, is that Dems don’t expect Kamala to win and that the better candidates said no.

Another potential factor is the apparent haste with which the Walz selection was made. The UK Daily Mail followed up on the "panic" in the Kamala camp over its story from last weekend about Second Dude Doug Emhoff's affair with his chlldren's nanny and the end of his first marriage:

'Put bluntly it's not a good look and Harris and her team know it. News of the affair has dominated coverage of the candidate over the weekend and sparked panic in her camp.'

. . . Harris tried to put the affair behind her with Tuesday's choice of outsider Tim Walz, as her running mate, hoping the spotlight would shift to the Minnesota Governor's rock-steady 30-year marriage.

The problem continues to be that Walz was thoroughly vetted by a committee led by campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former White House counsel Dana Remus.

By last Thursday, Holder and Remus had compiled their findings for a meeting Friday with a panel of trusted confidants who conducted the first interviews. They included Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and former Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a top Biden adviser who has remained on the Harris campaign.

By Saturday, the team had whittled the list down to three names — Walz, Shapiro and Kelly — who were told to prepare for face-to-face meetings with Harris.

All anyone can conclude is that the list of Walz negatives -- the stolen valor allegatioms, the DUI, his tacit approval of the Minneapolis riot that began the BLM cycle, and his support for extreme trans-enabling policies, all with rich video corroboration -- eluded the committee completely, or they didn't think they were important.

But that explains only how Walz made the short list, not why Kamala made the final decision. Mark Halperin has some good insights in yesterday's interview with Megyn Kelly:

Of the choice between Walz and Shapiro, he says,

There's a bunch of things, some issue-oriented, some personality, some based on her meeting with him, that made it clear that, on deadline, because she didn't have a very long runway here, one guy was easy, and the other guy was hard. One guy had vast, almost universal popularity within the party, the other guy, it turns out, has some enemies within the party.

. . . And then we get to the meeting on Sunday, where she meets face to face with those two . . . . It's a tale of two prospects, one, who does what a normal ambitious vice presidential candidate does: let's talk about this. What's the campaign gonna be like? How many of my people can I bring in? If we do win, what's my role as vice president?

These are questions people like John Edwards and Al Gore, when they were up to be on our ticket, they asked. . . . If you're the vice president, you demand that you're the last person in the room with the president when a decision's being made. . . . What was Walz's position? Walz's position was, "Hey, you want me to be the last person in the room, great! If you don't, all good!

And so, on deadline, when she needs a united party headed into the convention and the fall. . . . I haven't heard a single Democrat express anything but enthusiasm about the pick. . . . On deadline, one guy's easy, one guy's hard.

But Halperin keeps saying "on deadline". What on earth is the deadline? The Democrat convention is still more than a week away. Trump announced his pick of Vance the day his convention started. Why did Kamala have to pick Walz fully two weeks early? All I can think is that a sense of urgency was building even before last weekend, when according to the Daily Mail, the need to distract from the Emhoff story became even more urgent.

And although Halperin acknowledges Walz has a "liberal record", he doesn't factor in the stolen valor accusations, which have dogged Walz throughout his political career, and which so far have done quite a bit of damage to the campaign. As far as I'm concerned, this adds weight to the idea that, as I speculated yesterday, Kamala's interview with Shapiro gave him the impression that she wouldn't be a good partner, while Kamala got the impression that Shapiro's expectations were too high.

And that takes me back to the Eagleton scenario, that nobody else wanted the job, and a deeply flawed candidate was the only choice available.

UPDATE: And then there's this. . .

Wait till reporters start asking the gay bar owners in Minnesota about Tim Walz.

There’s a reason why he shakes his wife’s hand and panders to the gay community, and it’s not because he’s awkward…

It will all come out.@GovTimWalz pic.twitter.com/4uvMYDb8DG

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) August 8, 2024