Governor Tim Walz does "rural" and "folksy" on the Ezra Klein podcast

Here are some excerpts from Ezra Klein's interview with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, published Friday, August 2, 2024.  Walz, who grew up in rural Nebraska, served for decades in the national guard and as a high school teacher, is a contender to be Kamala Harris' VP/running mate.  In this interview, his rural bonafides come through loud and clear. I'll lead with this excerpt, which makes a critical point that I've been making since Trump's 2016 victory:  it's one thing to criticize Trump himself, and it's another to cast aspersions on his supporters:

Ezra Klein:  I want to get at this distinction you’re making, between Trump or Vance and the crowds. Because one of the most dangerous emotions that Democrats sometimes let slip — the negative side of, I think, the liberal personality — can be a kind of contempt, a kind of smugness. This is why Hillary Clinton’s comment on deplorables was so damaging. How do you police that boundary?

Governor Tim Walz:  This is where I take offense to JD Vance and “Hillbilly Elegy.” Those are my people. I come from a town of 400 — 24 kids in a class, 12 cousins, farming, those types of things. And I know they’re not weird. I know they’re not Donald Trump.

The thing is, we have to get them away from what he’s trying to sell because that’s not who they are. Just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and picking up a Frisbee and throwing it. And his dog catches it, and the dog runs over, and he gives him a good belly rub because he’s a good boy. That’s what I do. And that’s what those rallygoers do. That is exactly who they are, and they’re going through the same things all of our families are.

He’s captured some of this. And fear is scary. I mean, the world is changing. We’re seeing, you know, conflict in the Middle East. We saw a global pandemic, which he did nothing to fix but seized upon.

And I think it’s kind of breaking that spell again of saying, “Look, he’s not offering you anything.” And then we dang sure better be ready to offer something.

Klein:  Have you ever read “Hillbilly Elegy”?

Walz:  I did, years ago.

Klein:  I read it years ago, and I’ve been rereading it this week. I remember not thinking all that much of it then, but it feels like he’s predicting himself now. One of the big points early in the book is, he says: This is a story about people in a hard situation responding to it — and I’m paraphrasing — in the worst possible way. With anger, with resentment, with scapegoating of others without personal responsibility. A liberal would never talk about people and the places he’s from like that.

Walz:  No, that’s why I take offense to it. Look, societal changes, you’re going to see a migration of population patterns. But you’re also going to see those that accelerated that, those that took advantage of that, those like Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are telling you, “We need to do school vouchers.” How are you going to get a private school in a town of 400? That’s not where the private school is going to be. The private school is going to be where it already is, giving tax breaks to the wealthiest.

The two things that are core to small communities: school and hospital. So I don’t know the irony or the masterful design of this. It’s guys just like him telling you that these people are just angry, bitter. That’s not who we are. That’s not who they are.

But I’ll tell you what. There are concerns. Economies have shifted. Young people leave those communities. My community felt thriving when I was there — two grocery stores, a couple of bars downtown and all that. Now it’s empty main streets. That vision of “Hillbilly Elegy” was true. But he doesn’t tell you the story why. And the bitterness, the cultural bitterness, whatever, that’s just not true. They’re just looking for “What are things to rejuvenate us? How do we get back?”

And I think about this: A town that small had services like that and had a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I’m at today. Those are real stories in small towns.

These guys, they talk about how evil the public schools are. For many of us, public schools were everything. That was our path. That’s the great American contribution. 

Klein: You say there’s not a cultural bitterness, but there is a cultural frustration with the Democrats. If you looked at where people who didn’t go to college voted, they used to vote for Democrats. Now Democrats win college-educated voters nationally and lose non-college-educated voters. Those numbers are particularly stark among white voters. What do you make of that?

I think some of it is the alignment of economics. We’ve seen a migration to tech jobs, health care jobs in the cities. And then the cultural pieces — firearms start to get into that. You have long traditions that felt like they were being crushed.

We have got to figure out and see if we’re to some of the blame that we haven’t made the message clear enough. We haven’t delivered on those promises that people wanted to see.

* * * 

Klein:  Let me ask you about political geography. There’s a sense of, particularly, the Midwest as “That’s where people are normal. Then they get weirder on the coast.” You’re a former Army guy, right? You’re a former football coach. You’ve got real good Midwestern dad vibes. And so you can talk about the weirdness of Trump and Vance in a way that I think a lot of Democrats would not feel they could and also in a way that they’re like, “Oh, right, maybe we’re not the weird ones.”

Walz:  But I always think this is a very unhealthy dimension of our politics, a sense that there are sort of “real” Americans here, not “real” Americans there, beyond the coast. I’m curious how you think about this, both from the perspective of what it’s allowed you to say — maybe that would not have landed coming from others — and also just, like, what you do about it.

I started hearing this in 2006 and 2008, where people in the cities don’t know who we are — “We’re real American.”

When Klein asked Walz his theory of Trump's appeal to people, Walz admitted he was somewhat flummoxed.  Here's part of his response:  

These aren’t stupid people. These are smart people. But there’s a frustration of: Why aren’t things working? Why are they so complex? So, I don’t know, I’m just theorizing on it.

But that district that I represented in 2016, I won that district six times. There’d been one other Democrat since 1890, but I won it in 2008 by 32 points. I sneak by in 2016. He wins by 17 points in that same district. They never see him. They knew me. I coached their kids. I was there. I delivered in Congress. I was a ranking member on the V.A. committee. Just six, eight years before, nearly 70 percent of them voted for me. I didn’t do any scandal or do anything to lose their support. But this guy came in and — even though I was of them or felt I was of them, that this was me, I was truly their representative — they identified with him. So I don’t know.

Walz' degrees are from Chadron State University in Nebraska and Minnesota State University Mankato.  According to his wikipedia page, he has also worked in agriculture and manufacturing.