Not since Kevin Kline played the doppelgänger of a US president in the 1993 movie Dave has a politician instantly become such a beloved figure as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz. Here in Australia, he also had the familiarity of a lookalike. “He looks like all of Australia’s last five prime ministers morphed into one,” someone joked on X.
Australian prime ministers work tirelessly to portray themselves as an Australian everyman, what with their footy-loving at weekends and Akubra hat-wearing in the bush. But whether donning his camouflage hunting cap or recalling his years as a high school football coach, Walz pulls off the American archetype with effortless authenticity. The governor of Minnesota has even turned daggy dad jokes into a political art form, a skill that eluded Scott Morrison.
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It is not just the folksy aesthetics and the Friday Night Lights backstory that is so compelling. His messaging sets Walz apart. With one word – “weird” – he captured the oddness of Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. In doing so, he reframed the election and catapulted himself to stardom. Had it not been for his interview on MSNBC’s must-watch talkshow Morning Joe, where he first dropped the W-word, he would not have ended up on the Democratic ticket.
Rather than portraying Trump as an existential threat to democracy, which had been Joe Biden’s line of attack, he consciously decided to use more homespun and less abstract language. “That kind of stuff is overwhelming for people,” he told Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “Weird” was a way of showing, as he put it, “the emperor’s wearing no clothes”. Suddenly, it became the Democratic watchword.
Tim Walz, the vice-presidential nominee, at the Democratic National Convention.Credit: Bloomberg
It is not just Walz. The central reason Kamala Harris has confounded her many critics is the clarity of her messaging. In her first speech as the de facto Democratic nominee, she spoke of how her career as a prosecutor had pitted her against perpetrators of all kinds. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.” Bullseye.
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What makes her stump speeches sound so fresh is her redefinition of “freedom”, a nostrum traditionally associated with the American right. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, she used the word a dozen times, tying together her governing philosophy with the vocabulary of conservatism: “The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”
This has become the overarching theme of her campaign, and it comes with the added bonus of a soundtrack from Beyoncé, whose song Freedom has become Harris’ anthem.
