By Petula Dvorak, The Washington Post (c) 2024
“Mr. Walz.”
That’s who was on that big debate stage Tuesday night.
“Mr. Walz built the set for my senior play,” Andrea Johnson, one of Gov. Tim Walz’s former high school students, told a crowd of about 150 people who gathered to watch the vice-presidential debate and hear wholesome Walz stories straight out of Mankato.
“I want people to know he really is that genuine, authentic person they’ve been seeing on TV,” Johnson told me, explaining why she gathered all the Mankato folks she could find in the D.C. region (seven) and asked them to help her knock out any of the Beltway skepticism that may cloud voters’ views of the Minnesota governor running for vice president.
But let’s be honest.
This really wasn’t a crowd that needed winning over. It was a gathering of Maryland Democrats in deep-blue Montgomery County. A sports bar with 20 big screens. The kind of crowd that shouted down the manager when one – just one – screen was still on the ballgame.
“What’s the matter with this guy?” a woman in a sparkly Kamala shirt yelled. He changed the channel quickly. Spicy margaritas on the menu, sure, but this Tuesday night it was Wonkville.
The headliners at the pre-debate party were Johnson and Jenny Diaz, both former students of Tim and Gwen Walz.
“I distinctly remember sitting in Mr. Walz’s classroom when another student who really hated school and was known to act out interrupted with some snide comment, and a few other classmates started to pile on,” said Johnson, a self-diagnosed high school “goodie-two-shoes” who remembered waiting for Walz to snap and reprimand the troublemaker.
“But Mr. Walz did not do that. He sought to bring that student, those students in. He actively engaged them in conversation,” said Johnson, 40, who lives in Silver Spring and works in public policy. “He really sought to make them feel valued and make it clear that they had something to contribute. And I frankly, remember being floored at the time seeing this.”
A couple sharing the hot cookie skillet near her nodded at that.
“I guess I wanted confirmation that he’s a good guy,” said the woman in the Harris shirt. “Hearing it from them makes me feel better about him.”
Johnson did, however, recognize that wide-eyed look of burning incredulity that Walz gave the debate camera when former president Donald Trump’s running mate refused to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election.
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) replied to Walz’s question about that.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said. “I’m pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate, it’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.”
You can imagine how many high-schoolers got the look that Walz gave Vance for that non-answer.
The crowd erupted in applause when Jenny Diaz, 38, told them she’s now a public librarian in Maryland.
She said she learned to love information gathering as Gwen Walz’s journalism student.
And she learned to get past the shock of the roguish Tim Walz organizing the classroom desks in a U-shape, to encourage engagement.
“The thing that you’ve heard over and over again, and you will continue to hear, is that guy you see on TV is that guy who was our teacher, day in and day out,” Diaz said.
Denise Fleming never had Walz for a teacher. She didn’t even go to his school.
But he impacted her early years in Mankato in a profound way.
“I was like the only Democrat, and I was like the only gay kid in Mankato, Minnesota, or so I thought,” said Fleming, who went to a small Catholic school in Mankato. “And in 2005, 2006, when Mr. Walz started running for Congress, he supported gay marriage.”
That was an incredible, unfathomable thing for her isolated, 16-year-old self to hear.
“I heard the adults around me saying that there is no way this man can win if he supports [gay marriage]. No way. No way,” Fleming told the crowd. “Imagine my teenage shock when a Democrat gets elected to Congress in Mankato, Minnesota, publicly supporting gay marriage before anyone else does it.”
She was so shook, she said, that she came to Washington to work for Walz.
“Come on,” I told her. “Years working for him. You had to find some fault with the man.”
Fleming thought.
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes, it was really, really hard to get him out of a room.”
That long Midwestern goodbye. Gotcha, Walz.
With Walz on the big screens before them, the crowd on Tuesday night drank more white wine and fist-pumped when Walz went hard on reproductive health care and housing.
But Vance was more measured than they had expected.
“Comrade Kamala” and “Tampon Tim” never got checked off on their VP Debate Bingo cards.
But watching Walz and meeting – and hearing from – the Minnesotans during the debate did something for Andre Broadwater, 46, who comes from a family of Maryland politicians.
“Listen. A lot of people, politicians, are the same around here,” Broadwater said. “I like the way Kamala Harris flatlined Trump in her debate. And this here tonight shows me that Walz is real. I can’t imagine coming up and supporting my high school teachers like this. But his former students are. And that means something.”