What's Tony Thinking

Grace in Politics

With the announcement that Tim Walz would be Kamala Harris’s running mate, I went back to listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with Governor Walz which came out last week.

I was impressed. Walz is articulate and energetic. He is focused on actual, real-world solutions to the problems people experience. He speaks in plain jargon-free English. And — this is good — he’s not a lawyer! Nothing against lawyers, but there are just too many of them in politics. Walz was a National Guardsman, a schoolteacher and football coach before running for Congress in 2005. He’s not a lifer as a politician.

But what I liked most of all was what Walz had to say about grace. Here’s an excerpt:

“I think the Democrats’ way out of this is with optimism and a sense of grace toward folks. I want to be very careful. Like I said, those folks at those rallies, you insult them at great peril. Your neighbor is flying the flag, you insult them at great peril. Because they’re my relatives. They truly are, and I know them.”

Klein followed by asking Walz to talk about what grace in politics looks like.

Walz began by saying what it doesn’t look like, pointing to the disdain and contempt that are elemental to former President Trump’s style and message. Trump, said Walz, turns those who disagrees with him not simply into an opposing party or viewpoint, but into “the enemy.” “He is “masterful” at making someone the “other,” and so dehumanizing them, a dark art Walz termed “very, very dangerous.”

By contrast, Walz who made headlines recently by saying that Trump and Vance are just kind of “weird,” was very careful to say that this was not his view of those who support Trump or attend his rallies. Speaking of Trump rally-goers, Walz said,

“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?”

Walz refused to demonize the rural and small town people, many of whom have swung to Trump, in no small part because he knows them. They are his people. He comes from a town of 400 people, a farming community, where the school’s graduating class was 24 people. That could describe many of the towns out here in Eastern Oregon from whence I write.

Walz continues with an image the works,

“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.”

Sounds  like grace in politics to me. Respect people. Listen to them. Take them seriously. Moreover, Walz argued that if voters aren’t buying what the Democrats are selling, that’s not on the voters. That’s on the Democrats. He used an analogy from his school-teaching days. “If 90% of the students fail a test, something is wrong with my teaching.”

“So I keep coming back to this,” said Walz, “if they’re not voting for us, there’s not something wrong with them; there’s something that’s not quite clicking. So don’t assume they’re just not clever enough to understand what you’re selling them.”

That has been one of the great failing of today’s progressive elites, communicating that people who don’t buy what they’re selling are simply stupid or ill-informed or, worse, expendable.

So with Tim Walz who, by the way, is a Lutheran an element of grace comes to politics, and not a moment too soon.

And score a big one for Kamala Harris.