Pretty much immediately after Vice President Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota governor Tim Walz would be her running mate, the memes started flowing like the Mississippi after a snowy winter in Lake Itasca.
With his midwestern accent, unvarnished earnestness, and willingness to unleash Minnesota’s most devastating insult (“weird”) on political opponents, he reminded a lot of people—including me—of their kindly, helpful midwestern dad. Or uncle. Or grandpa. Or the kindly, helpful midwestern dad, uncle, or grandpa they wish they’d had.
Social-media posts by the thousands imagined Walz doing nice midwestern-dad-like things: backing a trailer into a tight spot, possessing a comprehensive knowledge of the weather forecast, saying “Ope!” after bumping into somebody. The gentle, jovial, friendly, outdoorsy, kind former high school history teacher was the new Chuck Norris.
But unlike Chuck Norris Facts of a bygone iteration of the Internet, the memes joking around about how wholesome and fatherly the Walz of the public imagination is, the real Tim Walz is somehow even more wholesome and fatherly. The “America’s Dad” jokes are funny, but any meme you can do, Walz can do better.
He has wholesome hobbies. Did you know that Tim Walz is a “map nerd”? How about the fact that he likes to tinker around with auto repair? He takes his dog to an off-leash dog park every morning. He’s sober but loves to drink Diet Mountain Dew, an objectively disgusting beverage, and posts about it on social media, because, in true Minnesota Dad fashion, he does not care if you think his favorite foods and beverages are gross. (My dad used to swear he enjoyed eating pickled herring. He tried to pretend he enjoyed lutefisk— best described to non-Scandinavian Americans as tasting like hot, fishy melting Jell-O. I think he liked it just fine but played it up because he knew it would get a rise out of us. Classic dad.)
I know of what I speak. The beloved teacher-coach is standard in small public schools in that neck of the woods–probably in every neck of the woods. My uncle is that teacher in Prescott, Wisconsin, a small town right across the river from Hastings, Minnesota. Like Tim Walz, my uncle has also been a successful coach at his school (baseball, though, not football). My mother was that teacher in Grantsburg and St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, coaching speech and drama and directing the school play. I texted my mom to tell her that she reminded me of Tim Walz, and she replied, “I’ll take that,” which is exactly what Tim Walz would say if you complimented him.
Governor Walz manages money like a cautious midwestern dad. “Tim Walz doesn’t own any stocks” sounds like it could be a somewhat bland entry in the Tim Walz Meme lexicon, but it’s actually a true thing about him. Just like about half of his fellow Americans, Walz doesn’t own stocks of any kind, according to his financial disclosures. The midwestern dad reportedly doesn’t play around in the market. He owns some land.
A key component of the midwestern-dad makeup is that even though he’s kind, he’s not a pushover. Walz has this quality in spades, as evidenced by his fiery if sometimes meandering screeds. If he were too slick and scripted, he’d blend into the media-trained, Chiclet-toothed denizens of cable news. I sit up and pay attention when Walz talks because I know that whatever he’s about to say won’t be bland garbage, nor will it be incendiary bullshit.
The midwestern dad doesn’t engage in name calling, but when he does, his insults cut to the quick. That’s why Republicans are in shambles trying to refute Walz’s charge that they’re weird. They can’t shake it, because it’s true. Even the most jovial Minnesotan will dish out veiled vitriol (like, say, a joke about the very funny but very false rumor that J.D. Vance wrote about having sex with a couch in Hillbilly Elegy) to people who need to be taken down a peg or two.
Vance is the perfect foil for somebody like Tim Walz. Walz is everything Vance pretends to be, with the added seasoned-teacher sixth sense of knowing when somebody is full of shit within seconds of observing them. At the height of her powers, my mother, the ex–public school teacher, could suss out with near-perfect accuracy when somebody was yanking her chain.
Walz knows how to act around children and animals. There’s a real photo of a delighted Walz cradling a piglet out there. There are many photos of him petting dogs and cats, feeding a bottle to a baby cow. And have you seen the video of Walz signing a law guaranteeing free school meals to Minnesota kids, and then the kids group-hug him, and Walz smiles like he’s lit up from the inside? The man’s a goddamn Care Bear.
But more important, his presence in the campaign lays bare the absurdity of the histrionics of Trumpworld. Try to imagine Donald Trump cradling a baby farm animal. Impossible, right? The man can’t hug his own daughter without it looking like something’s off. Can you imagine Donald Trump talking about, well, literally anything that isn’t himself, but especially something millions of normal, decent Americans enjoy, like fishing, having a dog, or walking around in a part of the outdoors that is not a golf course? Can you picture J.D. Vance being mobbed by a crowd of grateful schoolchildren? Earlier this week, the Republican vice-presidential nominee was asked the softball question “What makes you happy?” and Vance answered that he was not currently happy, then laughed like a maniac.
Beyond highlighting the strangeness of the opposition, the meme-ification of Walz seems rooted in a longing for a type of masculinity that’s going extinct in America: the power of a cheerful, useful, helpful, competent, and moral man. A man who knows how to fix things himself, who can make pleasant conversation with strangers, who is polite and courteous rather than boorish and obnoxious. A man who sees the world as, mostly, a pretty great place.
The Trump campaign is targeting aggrieved young men by promising to restore their rightful place of authority through oppressive legislation of everyone else. In the MAGA view, the American man has been unjustly torn down and humiliated, and the only way to rectify this is by seeking revenge. But Walz is a living counterexample to their claims. In a time when many American men feel lonely and useless, Walz is presenting an alternative: To be loved and celebrated, you don’t need to be a billionaire or a vulture or the king of your own McMansion. All you need to be is a good guy.
