CNN
Tim Walz has done little in the way of interviews since Vice President Kamala Harris selected the Minnesota governor as her running mate. His most prominent availability to date was conducted alongside Harris and across from CNN’s Dana Bash, a high profile joint interview that spanned some 26 minutes and yielded some 700 words from Walz.
If his performance in that short meeting with the press is any indication of his current readiness to answer tough questions, the CBS News debate on Tuesday night will be a rough one for the Democratic ticket.
Walz’s media aversion appears to be part of a considered strategy. As Axios reported last month, the Minnesota governor once embraced the local and national media, but has mostly avoided interviews and kept campaign reporters at arm’s length since he was selected as Harris’s running mate. Meanwhile, his opponent JD Vance has been on a frenzied, if not always effective, media tour. Tuesday night will reveal which approach better prepared its candidate for the largest and most sustained platform they’ll face this entire campaign.
Vance will no doubt face the tougher questions. Whatever controversies Walz has faced throughout his career, the oppo file on Vance is thicker. Between his comments, from just a few years ago, that his current running mate is “America’s Hitler,” and his current jihad against migrants in his own state on trumped-up charges of pet-ricide, there’s more than enough to confront the senator on.
But Walz has yet to show he’s capable of handling the obvious criticisms of his record.
The CNN interview provides a prime example. The lowlight of Walz’s brief cameo came in response to the first tough question posed to him. Bash asked about his military service and previous suggestion that he served in active combat, when he did not. Walz retired after 25 years of military service in 2005 to run for Congress. A few months later, his battalion was deployed to Iraq.
“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed actually in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.
Walz’s response was ambling and nonsensical. Here it is in full:
Well, first of all, I’m incredibly proud. I’ve done 24 years of wearin’ uniform of this country. Equally proud of my service in a public school classroom, whether it’s Congress or — or the governor. My record speaks for itself, but I think people are coming to get to know me. I — I speak like they do. I speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about — about our children being shot in schools and around — around guns. So I think people know me. They know who I am. They know where — where my heart is, and again, my record has been out there for over 40 years to — to speak for itself.
What’s so confounding about that is it’s the most obvious question Walz could have anticipated from Bash. The scrutiny around his prior claims about his service began in early August. The CNN interview was held Aug. 29. The would-be vice president had weeks to figure out an answer to one of the most pressing questions about his personal biography, and the best he could come up with, to defend this blatant lapse in honesty, was: “I speak candidly.”
Obviously, the problem is that Walz did not speak candidly.
Bash, who otherwise delivered a fairly gentle interview with the candidates, felt compelled to follow up for a response. His second chance at cleaning up his own mess went slightly better, since it at least explained why in the world he brought up school shootings in his first answer:
BASH: And the — the idea that you said that you were in war, did you misspeak, as the campaign has said?
WALZ: Yeah, I said — we were talking about in this case, this was after a school shooting, the ideas of carrying these weapons of war. And my wife the English teacher told me my grammar’s not always correct. But again, if it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog. I’m not gonna do that, and the one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another member’s service in any way. I never have and I never will.
Absent from both answers was a concession from Walz that he had erred. As veteran political advisers Mike Murphy and John Heilemann lamented on a recent episode of the great Hacks on Tap podcast — though they were speaking at the time about Harris’s flip flopping on fracking — politicians have a frustrating allergy to apologizing.
“Voters love it when you apologize for something,” Heilemann said. “It’s always a fight, because the candidates hate doing it,” Murphy added. “Hate it,” Heilemann noted, but “It’s the most relatable thing a candidate can do… people love to hear it.”
Indeed. That refusal to concede a mistake, in addition to the loitering trains of thought and confusing syntax, has been a hallmark of the Harris-Walz campaign during the course of this short race.
This is, of course, not to say that Trump’s campaign is a paragon of honesty and clarity. Farthest from it. Yet Vance, who served in Iraq, is particularly well equipped to hammer Walz on his military service and the way he has described it. It’s an attack that will come, and if Walz has any chance of winning Tuesday night’s debate, he needs to have a better answer than he did on CNN one month ago.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
