Election Countdown, 90 Days to Go: Three Lessons in Speech-Making.

Shapiro, Harris, and Walz each did their jobs last evening, in different and fascinating ways. Plus, the return of ‘Clear Eyes, Full Hearts.’

Kamala Harris introducing her running mate, Tim Walz, at a festive rally yesterday in Philadelphia. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.)

So much keeps happening so fast. Last week I was doing a post based on introducing the dark-horse Veep candidate no one had heard of, Tim Walz¹. As of this week … people have heard of him.

This post is about last night’s unveiling in Philadelphia of the new Harris-Walz ticket. A video of the whole event is on C-Span, here. My purpose is to highlight one element about each of the three closing presentations, which came in this order: first from Josh Shapiro, then Kamala Harris, then Tim Walz.

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Josh Shapiro: Grace under pressure.

If you wanted a preview of how a several-week “mini-primary” or “open convention” might have left bruises within the Democratic party, compared with the instant coalescence around Kamala Harris, you could get an idea from the past weeks’ veep-elimination game. First Gretchen Whitmer ruling herself out, then Roy Cooper. Pete Buttigieg as a media favorite but apparently never under serious consideration. JB Pritzker sometimes on the “serious” list, sometimes off. In the past few days the final winnowing: From four finalists to three, with the apparent elimination of Andy Beshear. Then three to two, minus Mark Kelly. That left the drama of the head-to-head Shapiro-Walz showdown, with Walz emerging yesterday as the chosen one and Shapiro as runner-up.

No one goes into politics wanting to come in second. The potential for bitterness among everyone except the first-place finisher is large.

This was especially true for Shapiro—long considered the favorite, all the more so after the unveiling was scheduled for his own home territory. So yesterday morning’s news from Kamala Harris must have been very hard for him. In such circumstances, after things had gone the wrong way, you could imagine a passed-over runner-up offering mere lip-service congratulations, half-heartedly showing up, barely hiding resentment or hurt feelings.

Maybe that is how Shapiro feels inside. But it is not how he acted yesterday. Instead Shapiro did his best—for the new ticket, for his commonwealth, and for himself in the long run. He didn’t pretend that nothing happened: there was an extra edge and bite to his opening comments about how he loved the people of his commonwealth and loved being their governor. To a roar of appreciative cheers he said, “I’m going to continue to pour my heart and soul into serving every single day as your governor.”

But in his very next words he pivoted to what else he would be doing: “I am going to be working my tail off to make sure we make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the next leaders of the United States.” And he dug right into the kind of impassioned, full-throated endorsement of the new ticket you would have expected if he had been the nominee himself. He seemed to hold nothing back, even shouting himself a little hoarse by the end.

He concluded the speech with another sharp-edged passage: About how the duties of “my faith” compelled him to do what was in the nation’s highest interests, and those of party, and of the new Harris-Walz ticket. He said, with added emphases to match his delivery:

I am proud of my faith. I am not here to preach at you all. But I am here to tell you what my faith teaches me. My faith teaches me that no one is required to complete the task. But neither are we free to refrain from it.

There is a lot packed into those few lines, more than I will get into right now. I’ll just say that this was a very carefully thought-through and effectively delivered near-conclusion of the speech.

It led directly to this, his final words, with call-and-response style cheers following each line:

Each of us has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, get in the game, and do our part. Are you ready to do your part? [Crowd: YES!] Are you ready to forge a more perfect union? [YES!]… Are you ready to look the next President of the United States in the eye and say, ‘Hello, Madam President?’ [YES YES YES!]

I am too. So let’s get to work!

It won big, sustained applause, and deserved to. The argument for Shapiro as veep had two main elements: That he could help lock down Pennsylvania, which would go far toward locking down the election. And that as a gifted speaker and debater he would help Kamala Harris make the party’s case across the country. Shapiro seemed to be doing his best on both those fronts yesterday. Which is in the party’s interest in 2024, and in his interest as a future face² of the party as well.

Respect and admiration to him. It was the right speech at the right time.

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Kamala Harris: It’s in the timing.

After Josh Shapiro finished (and following a musical interlude that included The Temptations’ My Girl), Kamala Harris and Tim Walz came out together. She spoke first, with him standing behind her, where he acted out responses to many of her comments in an amused and complementary-seeming rather than a distracting way. You’ll quickly get the idea from the clip.

One several-minute passage struck me as notable in both composition and delivery. Parts of it have been in the news, but it’s worth considering as a block. You can see it if you skip to time 40:30 of the Harris campaign YouTube embedded below. (You can see the same passage in this C-Span clip, which for technical reasons I can’t embed.)

This part is where Harris is introducing Walz, and hinting at some of his highly varied range of experience.³ The first thing I noticed was the economical, simply structured way in which Harris alludes to what Walz has done, by naming his changing sequence of titles. It’s an approach we’ve all heard before, but it matches these circumstances unusually well. It starts with Harris saying:

To those who know him best, Tim is more than a governor.

To his wife, Gwen, he is a husband. [At which point you’re thinking: Well, obviously. But she is setting up a sequence.]

To his kids, Hope and Gus, he is a dad. [Again, obviously … but the listener thinks, where is she going with this? No cheers yet.]

To his fellow veterans, he is Sergeant Major Walz. [And now we are moving into the identities that Harris wants to highlight for Walz. On this line the crowd responds, and Walz looks around and appears to nod and smile at fellow veterans.]

To the people of southern Minnesota, for 12 years he was Congressman.

To his former high-school students, he was Mister Walz. [Beaming smile from Walz. With a bigger one just about to come.]

And to his former high-school football players, he was Coach. [Big cheers, then scattered chants of Coach! Coach!.]

The payoff of the last line is using that one-word title on its own: Coach. For anyone who has ever been to a high-school pep rally or watched a single episode of Ted Lasso, it’s a term that is hallowed but also slightly self-mocking. There was pride and also amusement as Coach mugged for the crowd.

Here is Walz, in a C-Span screen shot, when Harris first calls him Coach:

She then went into a riff on her running mate’s history and achievements as “Coach Walz,” using so many Friday Night Lights allusions that by the end many listeners would be thinking “Clear eyes, full hearts…” without her having to say those words, or to spell out the end of the phrase: Can’t lose. The eight or so minutes that followed were a fuller introduction of “Coach Walz” and his record in varied realms.

The set-up I am focusing on— “To his fellow veterans,” “To his students” —did not involve “fancy writing” or lines that called attention to themselves as “oratory.” But it had the simple, plain elegance of words that conveyed exactly the impression the speaker had in mind—in this case, introducing a little-known figure with the themes the campaign hoped to stress. I took Harris’s confidence in using this passage, rather than something more earnest or high-falutin’, as a sign of trust and understanding between her and her writers.

And in delivery it was even more interesting, which is why I hope you will look at the clip. Harris’s command of pauses, stresses, and knowing smiles brings the audience perfectly along, even as they start to see the punchline coming. It is as if she is doing stand-up and knows that she’s holding the crowd. Her timing is exact.

Did Harris know how to speak this way during her brief 2020 presidential campaign? I didn’t see enough of her on the stump to know, and of course the circumstances were different. But she has clearly learned how to play with timing, and inflection, and smiles and winks and eye-rolls, and the mood of the crowd in a very skillful fashion. It’s also worth watching Walz’s speech-without-words through his reactions as he stands behind her. They are quite a pair. Clear eyes. Full hearts.

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Tim Walz: An explainer.

Some public figures are mainly doers. Joe Biden as president, for instance. Harry Truman as well. Some mainly inspire or motivate, with ideals or with fears. That is how John F. Kennedy had most of his influence. Ronald Reagan, and many others.

And a lucky few can explain. They have the gift of taking ideas or situations that are very complicated and making them comprehensible—and doing so without lecturing or seeming to talk down.

Among political figures Franklin D. Roosevelt was probably the greatest explainer in modern times. The young Bill Clinton could help voters of any education level share his view of how the economy worked, and why different policies would be better all around. Pete Buttigieg has had this talent since he came onto the national scene. Gavin Newsom has developed it. Media and comic figures with an interest in politics, from Mark Twain or Will Rogers through John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, can be the best explainers of all.

And Tim Walz is a good explainer. My post last week was about his background as a geographer and his impressive command of GIS-style mapping and analytical tools. It was with these tools, he told a rapt audience of some 20,000 geography experts at the Esri user conference last month, that he had helped high-school students in Nebraska understand genocide, past and future. As a new Fast Company article points out:

In 1993, his high school students in Nebraska built a global map that included layers with details about food insecurity, drought, and colonialism to try to predict where the next genocide could be. “They came up with Rwanda,” Walz told the crowd [at Esri]. “Twelve months later, the world witnessed the horrific genocide in Rwanda.” Many of the students went on to work at nonprofits.

Walz loves maps as explanatory tools, but he is also very good just with stories, and words. You’ll get a few illustrations in this speech. And you’ll also note his messages about tone, within the first few seconds after taking the stage.

First, about Kamala Harris. He began with:

Thank you, Madam Vice President for the trust you have put in me. But maybe more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.

The Happy Warriors. He didn’t need to spell out the contrast with the other side. Then, seconds later, about the man who wasn’t chosen:

And Pennsylvania, I know you know this, but My God, what a treasure you have in Josh Shapiro. [Sustained cheers and applause.] Holy hell, can this guy bring the fire? He can bring the fire!

Respect for a competitor who left it all on the field—and now was on the same team.

There’s still a long way to go, and no doubt bumps in the road for Harris, Walz, Shapiro, and everyone else. But it’s hard to see how the first-day launch could have gone any better for this team.

1. Notes from the in-house linguistics expert: Walz is of course a German name. My wife Deb, points out that in German it would be pronounced with a -tz sound at the end, as in the English word waltz.

When I first met Tim Walz I asked him how to say his name. He said “just like it’s spelled,” by which he meant no final -t sound. Each time I met him or talked about him after that, I labored my way through being careful to say “Governor WalZ.”

Then Deb did me the favor of pointing out that in English, for words like Walz, a final -z sound is indistinguishable from a final -s sound. So I could streamline things for myself by imagining that his name is spelled Walls and just say it that way. Weirdly for me that makes it much easier.

2. For the record: Shapiro is 51 years old. That is nine years younger than Harris and Walz, each of whom turns 60 this year. It’s also nine years older than Pete Buttigieg, who is 42. To round this out: Andy Beshear turns 47 this year, Gretchen Whitmer will turn 53, Gina Raimondo is 53, Gavin Newsom will be 57, and JB Pritzker is 59.

3. The two parts of the Walz bio that have been under-sold by the campaign so far are: His role as geographer, subject of my previous post; and the year he spent as one of the first US high-school teachers accepted to teach within China. This last was fodder for a nutso, “They must be kidding, right. Right???” segment by Jesse Watters on whether Walz has been a sleeper ChiCom agent.