A governor, a six-term Congressman, a National Guard artillery specialist, a school teacher for 20 years—and a geographer. A speech that will introduce you to him, and that contains surprises.
So, wow, how are we feeling about Tim Walz and the Harris-Walls campaign this morning after that introduction rally in Philly last night: high energy, joyous, superbly crafted and executed. $20million in new donations reported following this event. Trump is melting down on his crumby (alternative)Truth (anti)Social X imitation. Forget policy, people like Tim Walz. The 'youngs' love him; see David Hogg and Max Frost. And the 'olds' are not threatened because this guy is heartland warm and plain spoken.
I'm looking forward to your take on Shapiro, Harris and Walz speeches, and on the event over all.
Passion, pursuit of excellence, coaching and military experience, ability to communicate and integrity-not too often we get all of these in one candidate. James, great prescience, your sense is excellent, as it has been since the 70's.
Jim.. I was out of town and couldn't comment earlier. You nailed it with your prescience. As a history teacher I really like his presentation. Seems like he'd be a great VP and would debate rings around Vance.
Fascinating how we are actually having the short presidential campaign that other countries have had, where it doesn't get as dead and stale as it has been here for years. The silver lining of Biden hanging on too long. I haven't seen - or felt- this kind of excitement in a long time, especially among my students.
I was enthralled watching the Tim Walz presentation at the ESRI gathering - and when he became one of the potential nominees for Vice President, he immediately became my favorite due to the early exposure. So, Jim your judgment and assessment was spot on! I think the Harris//Walz alliance will prevail in 2024!!!
well, i hadn't planned on spending 35 minutes of my precious weekend watching a speech from a governor but damn if that man doesn't know how to tell a story. as it happens, i've been fascinated with maps since i was a kid, too, and my day job is taking data and telling stories, sometimes with maps, so i was all in. thanks, james fallows.
Mr. Fallows - thanks for this nice piece about Governor Walz and the Esri convention. As a former Minnesota political staffer turned GIS professional who was attending the conference, it was quite the experience to spend the week hearing how much other attendees seemed to like this speech. I heard from a lot of people that they were impressed with his public speaking skills, and the way Minnesota is applying geospatial thinking into policy matters. I don't think anyone expected him to be such a prominent figure in VP discussions only a week later! I agree with your assessment of how this speech speaks to Walz's strengths and definitely think the speech is worth a watch.
Thanks! Appreciate it and agree about those surprising effects, at the Esri conference and since then.
As I type, no idea who the VP pick will actually be — "savvy" handicapping as of this moment is leaning toward Shapiro — but if it's Walz, that will be positive news in many ways.
I also want to say that "Our Towns" was the first time I had heard about Esri and about GIS generally. So thank you for introducing that to me! There were many steps along the way as I entered this field, but I heard it there first. Beyond that, the book is such a refreshing way to think about the places we call home and how to build strong communities. I don't want to overstate it or anything, but I credit "Our Towns" with really helping to shape my thinking as I exited my 20s, and the "Here’s something you haven’t heard about, which is really interesting and is shaping your life in important ways" approach encouraged me to open up my thinking about my own career options.
James, any comment on the frequency of FB blocking my attempt to share article by posting to my Feed. Their automated observation is the the post violates their community standards in regards to: Policy Rationale
We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead, or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people's ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.
Online spam is a lucrative industry. Our policies and detection must constantly evolve to keep up with emerging spam trends and tactics. In taking action to combat spam, we seek to balance raising the costs for its producers and distributors on our platforms, with protecting the vibrant, authentic activity of our community.
Thanks James, I really enjoy your writing. You are now my 2nd substacker to be regularly rejected by the software evaluator as spam. I can’t see it, but I submit the decision for review and in each case have never received a response to request.
Hello from Minnesota (just about lifelong)! Love your work, always. And thrilled to know you're pulling, however courteously, for Gov Walz, a genuinely talented and effective politician -- in the best senses. I won't belabor all the fine qualities others have listed -- but I'll add one that I love: He is not afraid, he is not timid, he does not couch or otherwise "tap dance" -- his style is direct and confident. Sad that as a Dem, this really stands out to me. He's great. I'm pretty excited.
We have been blessed with several excellent and accomplished governors during my 52 years in Minnesota, but Tim Walz is in a different class altogether. Super-intelligent & informed, relentless energy, great communicator, innovative, great values, and focused on getting things done. The range of his life experience is extraordinary, and I suggest reading his bio on Wikipedia to get a better sense of that. Along with capable legislative leaders, he engineered a mind-boggling legislative program with only a 1-vote margin in the MN Senate. It is too long to enumerate here, but Will Stancil has in Twitter:
Walz would be very effective as the VP candidate: Already he has provided another vocabulary for attacking Trump/Vance. For the 13th consecutive time, Minnesota will be Blue in the Presidential election, so the question is what else does he bring? A lot, obviously. Whether he or the other very attractive options is "the best" will require some sophisticated thinking by Harris' brain trust.
As I mentioned after an earlier comment, it is *so* useful to hear from people who've actually been in Minnesota during these years.
This choice will all come down to a matter of "feel," as I say in the original post. And I retain my view that KH has a large range of positive options. But I've moved into hoping that the stars align to have her "feel" best about Walz. He really does bring a lot of assets.
It would be fantastic to have a geographer and a CSM as VP. So, I'm all in for Walz. I'm speaking as a geographer/retired senior NCO, so I'm biased towards someone who understands spatial relationships (geography) and physically getting things done (an NCO).
"Here’s something you haven’t heard about, which is really interesting and is shaping your life in important ways." That well frames what I like about your writing. I've often thought of you in the context of Theodore White and David Halberstram, though you're a little different. Both of them wrote extensively about American sociopolitical eras. You write about politics often, but always in short form. When you cite history, it's usually to illustrate a point related to a current event, rather than it being it's own raison d'etre. I've long hoped you'd get interested in a historical project with a longer arc. You'd be really good at it. But I guess one writes about what one is most interested in, and that has produced some really fabulous works in your case.
I am very grateful for your interest and support. As I believe I have mentioned in previous exchanges, David Halberstam was a very generous mentor of mine. And I had the good fortune to meet Theodore White once or twice, and of course learned from his books.
I studied American History & Literature in college, and those courses were — apart from my spending 12 hours a day at the college newspaper, and of course meeting Deb when we were both 18 years old — the most lasting influence of the college years on me. I love reading history and have sometimes written parts just "as history," mostly in my book 'Looking at the Sun' and also in some parts of 'Breaking the News' and 'China Airborne.' But I haven't done a "purely history" book — though that is one of the possibilities I am mulling over at the moment, in the "next book, when the election is over" category. More on that as I figure things out.
I sent the following to Chris Evans, Deputy Comms Director for MVP Harris:
"Executive experience: effective governor - got strong pro labor, pro climate, pro human rights agenda enacted with only 1 vote majority in MN Senate; Chair of Democratic Governors Assn
National issue experience: 12 years in Congress
Military experience: 24 years in National Guard, multiple medals
Geography: upper midwest, adjacent to WI, right across lake from MI, rural background
Great communicator - effective on TV, sense of humor, already scoring on trump & vance with 'weird' meme."
I omitted this -
Appeal to working class voters: Coached HS football team to state championship
"Picking an old dude would be a terrible move for Harris, says this old dude."
You do know that he's 60 y.o. right? +/- 6 mo.s older than Kamala. Or is it only about appearance? When you see Walz in action and hear him, he's not old at all.
The Democratic Party has a deep bench of very qualified candidates to help Harris' campaign. I have watched Walz with interest over many years, and wrote this in response to the article posted yesterday in the NY Times.
James | St. Paul, MN.
Governor Walz has been a steady, honest, respectful, genuinely patriotic representative and Governor. Regardless of whether Walz is a VP candidate, he will always do and say the right thing for the right reasons, without compromise, unexpected switches, or obfuscation like VP candidate Vance and the orange former guy leading the GOP. This is what leadership looks like.
I (heart) geography, i.e. maps. Walz and his audience are "my people." The talk was enlightening even if all it did was send you to the Wikipedia article on the "Durand Line." I use GPS, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View constantly -- they've made my life vastly more efficient -- but I won't part with my file drawer of topo sheets and road maps, nor my collection of atlases. They reside near my Hermes 3000 portable typewriter, as insurance against electronic apocalypse.
I have clients in the forest industry, and it's been fascinating to watch the revolution in their GIS since the 1980s -- Moore's Law in action. The information used to be in huge binders of base maps with up to 20 hand-colored Mylar overlays representing features such as hydrology, tree species, or wildlife habitat. Now planners and equipment operators can be deep in the woods and have all that knowledge, and far more, with one-meter resolution, at their fingertips in a touch-screen tablet computer.
Walz would make a terrific veep candidate, and veep, but so would most of the other contenders. Meanwhile, the people of Minnesota are fortunate indeed to have him as their governor. It would have been wonderful to have had him as a high school teacher. Thanks for this window into his thinking and background. I was already impressed very favorably by his effectiveness in recent media appearances.
I also <3 geography - the best purchase I ever made was the first edition of Geography:Regions and Concepts by Harm deBlij, for $2.98 at the Strand Bookstore.
Thanks for all of this. And on the "my people" front — I have been on the distant periphery of this culture for a long time, just from liking maps and also having known the Dangermond family in Redlands nearly all of my life. It does seem to me in the category of "most important technological revolution that you haven't heard about," in a way you will understand. People who use these maps know they're the basis of practically everything. Other people say... "GIS???" Some day I will figure out how exactly to tell this story.
Being from south Texas, I hadn't really heard of Governor Walz, so this video was of great interest. He would certainly be a great VP (and future president?) if he is permitted to bring to the office of vice-president the skills he's developed throughout his multi-faceted careers. Having served in the Reserves, he knows how to bring (relative) order to chaos. Having served as a member of Congress, he understands how to work those Halls. Having been a public school teacher, he no doubt knows how to make policies comprehensible to the average 6th grader, errrrr... American. I've been impressed with all the potential VPs Harris is considering, but this guy just became my top choice. Thanks so much for the education about both the man and GIS!
I like all the remaining VP contenders, as I've mentioned. But right at this moment, I'd be happiest for news that Walz was chosen. I'm glad you have gotten to see him in action.
So, wow, how are we feeling about Tim Walz and the Harris-Walls campaign this morning after that introduction rally in Philly last night: high energy, joyous, superbly crafted and executed. $20million in new donations reported following this event. Trump is melting down on his crumby (alternative)Truth (anti)Social X imitation. Forget policy, people like Tim Walz. The 'youngs' love him; see David Hogg and Max Frost. And the 'olds' are not threatened because this guy is heartland warm and plain spoken.
I'm looking forward to your take on Shapiro, Harris and Walz speeches, and on the event over all.
I bet many of us "olds" love him, too. He's got a lot to give!
Another teacher chiming in here...
Passion, pursuit of excellence, coaching and military experience, ability to communicate and integrity-not too often we get all of these in one candidate. James, great prescience, your sense is excellent, as it has been since the 70's.
Jim.. I was out of town and couldn't comment earlier. You nailed it with your prescience. As a history teacher I really like his presentation. Seems like he'd be a great VP and would debate rings around Vance.
Fascinating how we are actually having the short presidential campaign that other countries have had, where it doesn't get as dead and stale as it has been here for years. The silver lining of Biden hanging on too long. I haven't seen - or felt- this kind of excitement in a long time, especially among my students.
Keep up the great writing... Randy
Obviously this newsletter won the day for Gov. Tim Walz.
I was enthralled watching the Tim Walz presentation at the ESRI gathering - and when he became one of the potential nominees for Vice President, he immediately became my favorite due to the early exposure. So, Jim your judgment and assessment was spot on! I think the Harris//Walz alliance will prevail in 2024!!!
well, i hadn't planned on spending 35 minutes of my precious weekend watching a speech from a governor but damn if that man doesn't know how to tell a story. as it happens, i've been fascinated with maps since i was a kid, too, and my day job is taking data and telling stories, sometimes with maps, so i was all in. thanks, james fallows.
Mr. Fallows - thanks for this nice piece about Governor Walz and the Esri convention. As a former Minnesota political staffer turned GIS professional who was attending the conference, it was quite the experience to spend the week hearing how much other attendees seemed to like this speech. I heard from a lot of people that they were impressed with his public speaking skills, and the way Minnesota is applying geospatial thinking into policy matters. I don't think anyone expected him to be such a prominent figure in VP discussions only a week later! I agree with your assessment of how this speech speaks to Walz's strengths and definitely think the speech is worth a watch.
Thanks! Appreciate it and agree about those surprising effects, at the Esri conference and since then.
As I type, no idea who the VP pick will actually be — "savvy" handicapping as of this moment is leaning toward Shapiro — but if it's Walz, that will be positive news in many ways.
I also want to say that "Our Towns" was the first time I had heard about Esri and about GIS generally. So thank you for introducing that to me! There were many steps along the way as I entered this field, but I heard it there first. Beyond that, the book is such a refreshing way to think about the places we call home and how to build strong communities. I don't want to overstate it or anything, but I credit "Our Towns" with really helping to shape my thinking as I exited my 20s, and the "Here’s something you haven’t heard about, which is really interesting and is shaping your life in important ways" approach encouraged me to open up my thinking about my own career options.
James, any comment on the frequency of FB blocking my attempt to share article by posting to my Feed. Their automated observation is the the post violates their community standards in regards to: Policy Rationale
We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead, or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people's ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.
Online spam is a lucrative industry. Our policies and detection must constantly evolve to keep up with emerging spam trends and tactics. In taking action to combat spam, we seek to balance raising the costs for its producers and distributors on our platforms, with protecting the vibrant, authentic activity of our community.
Weird. I have no idea. I've never had a presence on Facebook, so I don't have any feel for how things work there. I will ask around.
Thanks James, I really enjoy your writing. You are now my 2nd substacker to be regularly rejected by the software evaluator as spam. I can’t see it, but I submit the decision for review and in each case have never received a response to request.
Hello from Minnesota (just about lifelong)! Love your work, always. And thrilled to know you're pulling, however courteously, for Gov Walz, a genuinely talented and effective politician -- in the best senses. I won't belabor all the fine qualities others have listed -- but I'll add one that I love: He is not afraid, he is not timid, he does not couch or otherwise "tap dance" -- his style is direct and confident. Sad that as a Dem, this really stands out to me. He's great. I'm pretty excited.
Thanks! Appreciate having another on-scene MN report.
We have been blessed with several excellent and accomplished governors during my 52 years in Minnesota, but Tim Walz is in a different class altogether. Super-intelligent & informed, relentless energy, great communicator, innovative, great values, and focused on getting things done. The range of his life experience is extraordinary, and I suggest reading his bio on Wikipedia to get a better sense of that. Along with capable legislative leaders, he engineered a mind-boggling legislative program with only a 1-vote margin in the MN Senate. It is too long to enumerate here, but Will Stancil has in Twitter:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1660846689450688514.html
Walz would be very effective as the VP candidate: Already he has provided another vocabulary for attacking Trump/Vance. For the 13th consecutive time, Minnesota will be Blue in the Presidential election, so the question is what else does he bring? A lot, obviously. Whether he or the other very attractive options is "the best" will require some sophisticated thinking by Harris' brain trust.
As I mentioned after an earlier comment, it is *so* useful to hear from people who've actually been in Minnesota during these years.
This choice will all come down to a matter of "feel," as I say in the original post. And I retain my view that KH has a large range of positive options. But I've moved into hoping that the stars align to have her "feel" best about Walz. He really does bring a lot of assets.
It would be fantastic to have a geographer and a CSM as VP. So, I'm all in for Walz. I'm speaking as a geographer/retired senior NCO, so I'm biased towards someone who understands spatial relationships (geography) and physically getting things done (an NCO).
NCO solidarity would be a great chord for him to strike.
"Here’s something you haven’t heard about, which is really interesting and is shaping your life in important ways." That well frames what I like about your writing. I've often thought of you in the context of Theodore White and David Halberstram, though you're a little different. Both of them wrote extensively about American sociopolitical eras. You write about politics often, but always in short form. When you cite history, it's usually to illustrate a point related to a current event, rather than it being it's own raison d'etre. I've long hoped you'd get interested in a historical project with a longer arc. You'd be really good at it. But I guess one writes about what one is most interested in, and that has produced some really fabulous works in your case.
I am very grateful for your interest and support. As I believe I have mentioned in previous exchanges, David Halberstam was a very generous mentor of mine. And I had the good fortune to meet Theodore White once or twice, and of course learned from his books.
I studied American History & Literature in college, and those courses were — apart from my spending 12 hours a day at the college newspaper, and of course meeting Deb when we were both 18 years old — the most lasting influence of the college years on me. I love reading history and have sometimes written parts just "as history," mostly in my book 'Looking at the Sun' and also in some parts of 'Breaking the News' and 'China Airborne.' But I haven't done a "purely history" book — though that is one of the possibilities I am mulling over at the moment, in the "next book, when the election is over" category. More on that as I figure things out.
Meanwhile my sincere thanks.
I sent the following to Chris Evans, Deputy Comms Director for MVP Harris:
"Executive experience: effective governor - got strong pro labor, pro climate, pro human rights agenda enacted with only 1 vote majority in MN Senate; Chair of Democratic Governors Assn
National issue experience: 12 years in Congress
Military experience: 24 years in National Guard, multiple medals
Geography: upper midwest, adjacent to WI, right across lake from MI, rural background
Great communicator - effective on TV, sense of humor, already scoring on trump & vance with 'weird' meme."
I omitted this -
Appeal to working class voters: Coached HS football team to state championship
Really? How many Americans think their HS football coach and/or social-studies teacher would make a good President?
I think the answer is close to zero.
Picking an old dude would be a terrible move for Harris, says this old dude.
"Picking an old dude would be a terrible move for Harris, says this old dude."
You do know that he's 60 y.o. right? +/- 6 mo.s older than Kamala. Or is it only about appearance? When you see Walz in action and hear him, he's not old at all.
He looks way older. Also fat. This is the first pic google shows me when I search for him:
https://www.wdio.com/front-page/top-stories/governor-tim-walz-signs-the-veterans-and-military-affairs-bill-into-law/
Harris needs to push the youth meme as hard as possible, isolating Trump as the old guy in the race. Walz undermines that.
Subject line was "Why Gov Walz should be choice for VP"
I also did include
"All positives, no negatives"
with the image of a Venn Diagram showing three intersecting circles:
1) Moderate white guy vibe, 2) Top tier TV skills, 3) Doesn't alienate any part of D coailition - only Walz was in the intersection of all 3.
Excellent summary, thank you!
The Democratic Party has a deep bench of very qualified candidates to help Harris' campaign. I have watched Walz with interest over many years, and wrote this in response to the article posted yesterday in the NY Times.
James | St. Paul, MN.
Governor Walz has been a steady, honest, respectful, genuinely patriotic representative and Governor. Regardless of whether Walz is a VP candidate, he will always do and say the right thing for the right reasons, without compromise, unexpected switches, or obfuscation like VP candidate Vance and the orange former guy leading the GOP. This is what leadership looks like.
Thanks. It's good to hear this kind of reaction from people who've seen his administration up-close in MN.
I (heart) geography, i.e. maps. Walz and his audience are "my people." The talk was enlightening even if all it did was send you to the Wikipedia article on the "Durand Line." I use GPS, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View constantly -- they've made my life vastly more efficient -- but I won't part with my file drawer of topo sheets and road maps, nor my collection of atlases. They reside near my Hermes 3000 portable typewriter, as insurance against electronic apocalypse.
I have clients in the forest industry, and it's been fascinating to watch the revolution in their GIS since the 1980s -- Moore's Law in action. The information used to be in huge binders of base maps with up to 20 hand-colored Mylar overlays representing features such as hydrology, tree species, or wildlife habitat. Now planners and equipment operators can be deep in the woods and have all that knowledge, and far more, with one-meter resolution, at their fingertips in a touch-screen tablet computer.
Walz would make a terrific veep candidate, and veep, but so would most of the other contenders. Meanwhile, the people of Minnesota are fortunate indeed to have him as their governor. It would have been wonderful to have had him as a high school teacher. Thanks for this window into his thinking and background. I was already impressed very favorably by his effectiveness in recent media appearances.
I also <3 geography - the best purchase I ever made was the first edition of Geography:Regions and Concepts by Harm deBlij, for $2.98 at the Strand Bookstore.
I bought updated editions every few years.
Thanks for all of this. And on the "my people" front — I have been on the distant periphery of this culture for a long time, just from liking maps and also having known the Dangermond family in Redlands nearly all of my life. It does seem to me in the category of "most important technological revolution that you haven't heard about," in a way you will understand. People who use these maps know they're the basis of practically everything. Other people say... "GIS???" Some day I will figure out how exactly to tell this story.
Being from south Texas, I hadn't really heard of Governor Walz, so this video was of great interest. He would certainly be a great VP (and future president?) if he is permitted to bring to the office of vice-president the skills he's developed throughout his multi-faceted careers. Having served in the Reserves, he knows how to bring (relative) order to chaos. Having served as a member of Congress, he understands how to work those Halls. Having been a public school teacher, he no doubt knows how to make policies comprehensible to the average 6th grader, errrrr... American. I've been impressed with all the potential VPs Harris is considering, but this guy just became my top choice. Thanks so much for the education about both the man and GIS!
Thanks.
I like all the remaining VP contenders, as I've mentioned. But right at this moment, I'd be happiest for news that Walz was chosen. I'm glad you have gotten to see him in action.