Tim Walz was a brilliant choice

He may look like a boring, safe, interchangeable white dude on first glance, but he's actually quite progressive, full of charisma, and the perfect pick to energize and unite the party.

Our piglet loving boi

So the Democrats got it together to replace Biden with Harris; she launched a stunningly strong campaign out of the gate, raised a metric shit-ton of cash and energized the party like I hadn’t seen in over a decade; and we just needed her not to blunt her own momentum by picking some milquetoast white guy like Tim Kaine who deflated and alienated the left.

I was personally hoping for Tim Walz, the progressive, farm-animal-loving governor of Minnesota who launched himself into national prominence two weeks ago simply by going on TV and calling Trump and J.D. Vance “weird” with a kind of natural charisma and charm that’s rare to find in politics these days. And by god, she picked him!

Walz is as great a Vice Presidential nominee as we could have hoped for. He’s a veteran and former public high school geography teacher who made Minnesota one of the few states to give kids free meals at school. He signed a law guaranteeing 20 weeks of paid family and medical leave for Minnesotans and another protecting abortion rights in the state after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade. As a football coach, he was a faculty advisor for a gay-straight alliance (in **rural Minnesota in the 1990s**!). He’s consistently won elections a progressive Dem in a rural, conservative area of his state. Democrats across the political spectrum - literally from AOC to Joe Manchin (though he’s technically Independent now) - can enthusiastically support him.

Walz is also the perfect antidote to the Republican ticket’s weird pro-natalism. As J.D. Vance shames “childless cat ladies” - demanding that women bear children while making it more expensive for us to raise them, and opposing abortion rights and IVF - Walz has spoken about using fertility services to have his own two kids, Hope and Gus. "My wife and I used Mayo Clinic reproductive services, and my daughter Hope was named Hope for a reason," he told my former colleague Arthur Delaney earlier this year. "Because married for eight years, no children, wanting children. We got Hope because of this type of stuff."

Walz wife Glen, meanwhile, is a passionate advocate of education for incarcerated people - a platform we’ve never had in a Second Lady or Gentleman.

In conclusion, as today is my birthday, I am thrilled at having woken up to the gift of once again being pleasantly surprised by the Democratic Party. And also the gift of Republicans like Ben Shapiro having no idea how to attack this man who hunts and fishes and is generally likable to even them. Onward!