The joyful Minnesota governor is a valuable spokesperson for Harris whose background and personality can help the Democratic ticket undermine Trump’s efforts to woo America’s men.
Tim Walz’s first official speech on the Democratic ticket displayed all the reasons that Kamala Harris has been lauded for picking the Minnesota governor as her running mate. Personally, I think one outshines all the rest.
Walz’s military background and his work as a high school teacher and football coach, along with his palpable joy and open expressions of compassion for people in need, offer America a vision of what manhood can look like — he’s a “joyful warrior” offering a vision in contrast with what’s being offered by Donald Trump’s bravado-driven campaign.
And he’s clearly willing to challenge Team Trump on that front. He displayed that even before he received the call to join Harris’ campaign, using public appearances to refer to Trump and his allies as “bullies” who are truly weak at heart and by mocking the GOP ticket for “running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something.”
And the outlets he’s going on aren’t challenging him. They’re just giving him a platform. It seems like for the most part (except when he goes on Fox, but that’s not “mainstream”) the media outlets are totally accepting Pete Buttigieg is a form of manly. I think we’re actually having a national dialog right now about what it means to be manly. Even this years big pop culture moment of Kendrick v Drake has centered around what it means to be a man (at least in part) with the winning side saying what it means to be a man is to live authentically and not to perform masculinity. I get where the thread starter is coming from that we shouldn’t need this national dialog, because we should be treating people as people and not as totems, but American politics and media culture are intrinsically totemic in nature and so we have to have these national dialogs every so often even if the majority is already advanced beyond that. The fact is that people awaken to truths slower than others because of the cultural context they exist in, and right now the feminist and men’s liberation movement have a major opportunity to take center stage and show what preferred pronouns, gender identity, and acceptance are about.
It’s positive but he isn’t being portrayed as manly or daddy the way Tim Walz is, though, and I do think that comes down to sexism - specifically patriarchal heterocisnormativity. He’s gets to be a model minority, that’s it.
