Camo Chameleon

Politics is a noble profession

Today is the primary in Wisconsin, as you watch results make sure to look out for Welcome-endorsed Rebecca Cooke’s bid in the 3rd congressional district. Cooke scares both insurrectionist incumbent Derrick Van Orden and the Congressional Progressive Caucus leader, as we covered last week.

It has now been a week since Kamala Harris selected her running mate. He’s a pro.

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Tim Walz is a politician. That is a good thing.

Social media is agog with memes about “Coach Walz,” the lovable Midwesterner who has spawned adorable piglet pictures and a spate of dad jokes. Rep. Angie Craig summed up the vibe that had Democrats feeling like they cracked the code to winning over middle America: “I’ve been turkey hunting with him in the morning and then to a gay rights dinner that night."¹

In less than a week, the new ticket had not only raised tens of millions of dollars, but sold out of hunter-themed camouflage “Harris Walz” hats.

As AOC herself noted, it takes a special politician to garner approval from both her and Joe Manchin. But what it takes is a true practitioner of politics, one who did so well at acting like he’s not an ambitious politician that Harris picked him to be VP.

Before the VP selection - in “Unity Eve” - we emphasized a few things.

1. The ideological nature of the Walz vs. Shapiro debate was overblown

2. Walz ran (and voted) to the right of most Democrats to win and hold a House seat

3. Democrats would be united regardless of who was picked out of these finalists

Not gonna lie, the Welcome team text threads did not exactly light up with celebratory emojis when the Walz pick was first announced (as we told The Boston Globe). More on that behind the paywall, but we should reiterate the biggest takeaway, as we noted before the selection. For Walz to be the “progressive pick” shows just how much the party has shifted over the past four years:

The crop of VP contenders has, like most everything else in presidential nominating processes, settled along ideological fault lines. But the allegedly progressive pick shows just how much the Democratic Party has returned to normalcy.

Here’s how the journalist Jonathan Martin put it:

The ideological piece of this is largely wishcasting, to put it mildly. Any Dem operative or elected who knows Harris or Walz will tell ya they’re not true believers. They’re pols and wanna win.

Walz is a Pol

Conservatives tried critiquing Kamala’s “code-switching”, the ability to speak differently to different audiences (just as they did to Obama). JD Vance took the critique to a new level over the weekend, calling the Democratic ticket “chameleon.”

But the chameleon-like nature that Tim Walz has exhibited is essential in a sprawling, diverse country with an “exhausted majority” of voters sick of partisan extremism in politics.

We believe the best way to defend democracy is to practice it - especially when that means engaging those you disagree with. And winning them over.

As Joel Wertheimer notes on X, the GOP attacks of Walz and Harris as chameleons will only serve to remind voters that Harris and Walz are not extremists. Both have demonstrated they will take more centrist positions aligned with their values.

The code-switching means that while Walz racked up progressive accolades, he has earned praised from “friends” like the GOP Governor of Ohio, and even Trump himself.

In every single session he was in the House, Walz voted more conservatively than at least 70% of his Democratic colleagues. In his final congressional run, he was endorsed by the NRA.

Congressman Walz > Governor Walz

Gabe Fleisher summed up his record succinctly: “Congressman Walz would have been a much better VP pick than Governor Walz.”

One of Harris’ biggest liabilities in this election is that voters consider her to be even more liberal than Biden, who they already considered to be too liberal. Shapiro, with his crossover appeal to Trump voters and breaks with Democratic orthodoxy on issues like school vouchers, had both the electoral and policy record to help address that vulnerability. Congressman Walz did, too — but Governor Walz has taken stances that will only help feed into it.⁴

But back to the matter at hand: here’s where the ideological matchup is right now on the Democratic and GOP tickets (via Matt Darling).

Vance is the ideological outlier here. And he is, it increasingly appears, an amateur.

Harris is a Pol - Cori Bush was not

Speaking of ideological outliers who don’t hold up to scrutiny, another Squad member lost last week. Cori Bush became the second Justice Democrats-backed incumbent to lose a Democratic primary this summer. Of the three Squad members who weren’t politicians before running for Congress, two lost this year (Bush & Jamaal Bowman lost, “and the third is a political prodigy”²).

Should we be concerned about the Far Left in the presidential (even though they’ve peaked)? Here’s Gabe Fleisher on the interplay between the Far Left and Harris’ VP pick:

Harris’ first presidential campaign, in 2019, partially collapsed because she lost sight of the median voter in that primary, chasing progressive support and online virality and forgetting (as the Biden campaign recognized) that “Twitter is not real life.” The biggest worry for Democrats with the Walz pick should be that Harris, once again, is chasing Twitter support rather than engineering her campaign to persuade a narrow slice of must-win voters. The question Democrats have to ask themselves is this: if Jamaal Bowman and the DSA are ecstatic over your VP pick, should alarm bells be ringing about how they’re being perceived by independent voters?⁵

Kamala is showing herself to be a pro, however (as Lauren’s weekly Kamala is Moderate digest from the weekend again showed). As a politician practicing democracy not distorted by leftist advocacy groups, she can do what is necessary to win the middle. And that includes a heavy dose of patriotism. Here’s Jonathan Martin again:

How will she run? Will she practice the sort of defensive politics Bill Clinton and Barack Obama mastered, in their own way and in different decades, to reassure middle America they were no radicals? Or will she adopt a new, fit-for-Trumpian-times model of simply rousing core supporters and betting contempt for opposition will carry the day?

She did both on Tuesday and, before a partisan audience, it was not surprising that the red meat drew the loudest applause. Yet for a candidate knocked for being captive to prepared remarks — and she’s still yet to speak extemporaneously for any length since President Joe Biden withdrew from the race — her most effective moment may have been when she deviated slightly from script.

It was when she hailed “the promise of America,” recounting how “two middle-class kids” from very different places, Oakland, California, and the heartland, could perhaps get to the White House together.

“Only in America,” she said, repeating herself. Then, as if in the pulpit, she said it three more times: “Only in America.” The crowd, perhaps inspired by the Olympics, got the cue and began chanting “U-S-A!”

It was the stuff of Republican nightmares.

After nearly a decade of presidential nominees refusing to pivot to the middle after winning the primary, the nightmare may be ending for the median voter - and just beginning for MAGA.

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