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This is my November 7 Washington Free Beacon column on the failed vice presidential candidacy of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in the election of 2024 (republished with permission).

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ST. PAUL, Minn.—A week before Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate, I facetiously urged her to “Take My Governor—Please.” Walz has compiled an uber-woke record as Minnesota governor. When he was elected to a second term in November 2022, the DFL won majorities in both houses of the Minnesota legislature. With the DFL in control, the legislature spent an $18 billion surplus on infrastructure, “education,” and entitlements.

We have become the land of 10,000 entitlements. The legislature raised taxes and adopted the law that earned Walz the moniker of Tampon Tim. They enacted an extreme pro-abortion and “trans refuge” law. The details were so embarrassing that Walz chose to lie about them once Harris heard my plea and chose Walz as her vice presidential running mate.

Harris’s loss to former president Donald Trump in Tuesday’s election returns Walz to sender. Back home in Minnesota, the local press now contemplates the prospect of Walz as a 2028 presidential candidate. Much like the New York Times on the national scene, Minnesota’s local press is out of touch with reality in a way that would warrant the commitment of your average working stiff.

The Times, by the way, found Walz to be “folksy” and “factually sloppy.” Some translation is required. In the glare of the national spotlight, Walz was exposed as a compulsive liar with almost shocking speed.

Minnesota’s dominant newspaper—the Star Tribune—is managed by a publisher, Steve Grove, who actually served as an official during the first term of the Walz administration. You’d think the paper might have been embarrassed by Walz’s exposure as a liar, but it kept up the cheerleading through Election Day, referring to him as “America’s Sweetheart.”

“People are obsessed with Walz and his ‘big dad energy,’” the paper wrote in August. It turns out, not so much.

Walz’s exposure during the campaign must have come as something of a shock to readers who get their news from the Star Tribune. The photo below depicts the Star Tribune team on their way to the Democratic National Convention to cover Walz’s ascent.


The Star Tribune team on their way to the Democratic convention.

Omitting Walz’s inflation of his rank in the Minnesota National Guard, the left-wing Minnesota Reformer summarized a few of Walz’s whoppers this way:

He once implied he had seen combat while in the National Guard when he had not; said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre when he wasn’t; claimed that “over 80% of (Minnesota) students missed less than 10 days of in-class learning” during the pandemic when he actually closed schools for months; and he repeatedly said he and his wife, Gwen Walz, used in vitro fertilization … to start his family when they actually used a different kind of fertility treatment.

On Tuesday evening, the Star Tribune home page headlined the pending victory of the Harris-Walz ticket in Minnesota as big news. The Harris-Walz ticket carried the state by a not particularly impressive 4 points. The Star Tribune failed to note that Trump carried Walz’s old Minnesota congressional district by a 55-43 percent margin.

Walz’s “folksy” shtick was supposed to appeal to folks like Walz’s congressional constituents, but he has “outgrown” them. He comes across as the fast-talking con man the rest of the country got to know during the campaign.

Walz’s mock humility and effeminate theatrics, however, were something new. We had not previously seen him display these affectations.

The Minnesota DFL was built by manly men such as Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, and Don Fraser. They made the DFL by expelling the communists in their midst. One suspects they would have been appalled by the man who claimed he “was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May of ‘89. And as the events were unfolding, several of us went in.” As Walz told the story: “And I still remember the train station in Hong Kong. There was a large number of, especially European, I think, very angry that we would still go after what had happened, but it was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels.”

The Free Beacon found Walz’s tale to be of the tall variety in Alana Goodman’s September 30 story. Weird.

Weirdest of all to those of us back in Minnesota was Walz’s portrayal of himself as some kind of freedom fighter. When Walz taunted Republicans to “mind your own damned business,” he presented a pure case of projection. Resentful of his inability to impose his will on the legislature in the first year of his administration, Walz seized on the opportunity to rule by decree during his COVID regime for 15 long months. Walz gave us a vivid demonstration of the suffocating and destructive nature of dictatorship.

The defeat of the Harris-Walz ticket by President Trump has spared the nation in more ways than one.