Reportedly, the Democrats hope that Tim Walz can appeal to rural and small-town voters who might otherwise succumb to MAGA mania. They also want to sell him as a distinguished veteran of military service.
In fact, while Walz has at times lived in small towns, he is arrogantly contemptuous of rural America. He infamously told fellow Democrats not to worry about the broad red swaths on electoral maps, since those rural areas consist of “mostly rocks and cows.” That line was so notorious that rural Minnesotans banded together to form a group called Rocks and Cows of Minnesota, which sold merchandise and erected anti-Walz billboards across the state.
And when he ran for re-election in 2022, Walz was nearly shut out in rural Minnesota:
How about Walz’s status as a veteran? It is true that he was, for 24 years, a member of the Minnesota National Guard, and he rose to a high rank in that body. But it all ended when the Minnesota Guard was deployed to Iraq. Rather than serve, Walz quit. Many of his fellow Guardsmen were bitter:
In a letter posted to Facebook in 2018 as he first ran for governor, retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr said Walz retired from his 24-year tenure in the National Guard after learning that his battalion would be deployed to Iraq, despite allegedly assuring his fellow troops he would join them.
“On May 16th, 2005, [Walz] quit, betraying his country, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war,” Behrends and Herr wrote.
So if the Democrats think they can sell Tim Walz as an honorable veteran and an advocate for rural America, they are destined to be disappointed.
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