Kamala Harris and the Cool Dad Next Door

Mstateless—Kamala Harris officially won enough delegates to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee on Friday. Her campaign raised $310 million in July, more than double Trump’s, buoyed by a mix of memes and pragmatism.

But on July 31, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran. The killing, like that of Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur in Beirut the day before, was blamed on Israel. When Harris announced that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who started the recent trend of calling Trump “weird,” would be her running mate Tuesday morning, Hezbollah retaliated against Israel with a swarm of drones.

The response to Walz and his dad-next-door image has been overwhelmingly positive, with even Barack Obama offering high praise. If and when things escalate further in the Middle East, however, the honeymoon period for Harris and Walz could come to an abrupt end.

Indeed, Walz’s choice over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro highlights an electoral paradox: For progressives who couldn’t in good conscience vote for Genocide Joe, the war in Gaza remains paramount. Four years ago, the top issue for those on the left was mass incarceration and police violence, hence the now-forgotten disdain for Harris’s prosecutorial past.

Shapiro, who runs a swing state, seemed like a natural fit for vice president, but he said things (like comparing college students who set up pro-Palestine camps to the KKK) that would alienate the progressives Harris appears to have won over simply by not being Biden.

The irony is that Harris and Walz are open about everything except Palestine. While Trump and his friends are already trying to paint Walz as a far-left radical, the former geography teacher and high school football coach is busy laying the groundwork for a rebranding of small-town values ​​as liberal, and he has the track record to prove it, from free school lunches to a generous child tax credit.

It’s almost as if the internet thought Walz fell out of a coconut tree, as if Minnesota had never been on the national or international stage. But Minnesota was the epicenter of the largest protest movement in American history after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and Walz oversaw the state’s largest civilian police deployment in response. Walz has distanced himself from calls to defund the police, though he did sign the Minnesota Police Accountability Act, which banned warrior-style training and chokeholds, among other things.

In a press conference during what has been dubbed the Minneapolis uprising, Walz said the protests against racially motivated police violence had brought more destruction and terror to Minnesota than any other state in history, more than “the wars we’ve fought to protect our nation, the war on terror and all that,” justifying tear gas, curfews, sieges and mass arrests against them.

That version of Governor Walz is now all but forgotten. A strange collective amnesia seems to be taking place, with “Minnesota nice” going from being a euphemism for racism to a stand-in for policies that now include a social safety net.

From a foreign policy perspective, Walz has antiwar leanings. A former Army sergeant, Walz first ran for Congress on an antiwar platform and played a leading role in urging President Obama not to go to war in Syria. The question is: Which version of Walz will we get in the coming months?

Given that Iran believes it has a duty to avenge Haniyeh’s death (and intends to do so “whatever the consequences”), it may only be a matter of time before the friendly dad next door dons a more authoritarian identity again.