What Was Wrong With Walz’s Speech

Plus, Trump Calls Harvard Antisemitism a “Disgrace”

The Democrats are doing their best in Chicago this week to portray their vice presidential candidate, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, as a mainstream, middle-American guy. Senator Klobuchar introduced him last night as a “hunter,” a “dad in plaid,” a “football coach” characterized by “Midwestern common sense” who delivered “the biggest tax cut in Minnesota history.”

When Walz finally spoke, he said some things that were misleading. Here is one line that was pretty outrageous: “When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations — free to pollute your air and water. And banks — free to take advantage of customers.”

Whatever his faults, President Biden has been fairly careful and consistent about distinguishing, at least rhetorically, between “Republicans” and “MAGA Republicans.” Walz dropped that distinction and demonized Republicans—tens of millions of Americans—by claiming, preposterously, that they favor pollution. When prominent Democrats such as Walz talk about banks and corporations only as polluters and as trying to “take advantage of customers,” rather than as institutions serving customers, creating jobs, and generating value for shareholders, it poisons the intellectual atmosphere just as surely as some industrial polluter dumping chemical waste into a previously pure stream.

What’s more, “when Republicans use the word freedom,” some of them are using it to describe the ability to criticize the government or worship freely in places like Communist China, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Syria, or Cuba. Walz ignores freedom overseas, where Republican support for a robust foreign and defense policy has, at least traditionally, helped to protect and expand freedom, often in a bipartisan way.

And the idea that it’s only Republicans who would free the government “to invade your doctor’s office” is preposterous. As if Democratic backed programs, from ObamaCare to Medicare and Medicaid, don’t impose their own burdens, restrictions, and regulatory obligations on healthcare providers? It’d be one thing if Democrats backed a consistently libertarian, hands-off approach to government involvement in health care. But the reality is that for Walz and Harris, abortion is almost the only part of the medical system that they don’t want government involved in. With a lone exception, for example, the Food and Drug Administration, even in the Biden-Harris administration, prohibits the sale of over-the-counter birth control pills. The Biden-Harris administration also requires a doctor’s prescription for abortion pills. The framing of this as some sort of “freedom” issue is clever, but if you think about it, it’s phony, or at least so selective as to be inconsistent.

Here’s another passage from the Walz speech that struck me as ridiculous. “We know, if these guys get back in the White House, they’ll start jacking up the costs on the middle class. They’ll repeal the Affordable Care Act. They’ll gut Social Security and Medicare. And they will ban abortion across this country, with or without Congress,” Walz said. A few minutes earlier, Oprah Winfrey had spoken about “people who want to scare you.” She presumably meant Republicans talking about illegal immigrants, but here is Walz trying to scare voters about what a second Trump term would mean. Are there too few genuine reasons to vote against Trump, so that Walz needs to resort to inventing phony ones? Leave aside that Trump was already in for four years and did not do any of the things that Walz claims he will do in a second term. Trump has been crystal clear that he isn’t going to touch Social Security or Medicare. He’s been so clear that the Republicans and fiscally conservative centrists who want “entitlement reform” are upset with him about it. Likewise, with abortion, the people who favor a federal ban are annoyed with Trump, who wants to leave it to the states. Why wouldn’t Walz simply stick with the truth, which is that abortion is getting restricted severely in some Republican-dominated states, rather than making the overstated claim that “they will ban abortion across this country”?

There’s an “ends justify the means” view that Trump is such a grave threat to America in so many ways that it’s worth saying anything negative about him, even if it isn’t true, if if will help defeat him. I am not a Trump partisan. I think voters are smart and well informed enough (or will be by Election Day) to discount some of the less serious claims being hurled by the politicians. But one of the accusations that Biden has been making against Trump is that he lies, so it’s hypocritical of the Democrats to be so cavalier about the factual basis of their claims.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg spoke minutes before Walz about politics as “a kind of soulcraft,” borrowing from the title of George Will’s 1983 book. If politics is soulcraft, what does it do to one’s soul to get elected by selling voters on a false narrative? It’s corrosive to democracy, and to virtue, to throw truth-telling to the sidelines.

Toward the end of his talk, Walz disclosed his goal: “we’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom.” Again, “the bedroom” may be the one place Walz doesn’t want the government to be. Socialist Senator Sanders talked about making health care a human right, but Walz one-upped him. If health care and housing are “human rights,” what’s next? Food? Clothing? Transportation? Eventually nobody has to work at all, the government just provides this stuff because it’s a “right”? Once these “rights” are established, they wind up interfering with other people’s property rights and rights of self-ownership. For example, if health care is a “human right,” doctors and nurses then may become the slaves of government, which can force them to provide care even without being paid a price or wage that they freely agree to. If housing is a “human right,” what about the right of the landlord to be paid a market-based rent for the property that the landlord owns?

In a lot of the countries where health care and housing are on the books as “rights,” the health care and housing are worse than in America, where we don’t have the on-paper “rights” but we have had free markets that do a better job, overall, of allocating and incentivizing resources than do government bureaucrats. Tim Walz is right about keeping the government out of bedrooms. He’d engender more confidence if applied similar skepticism to the role of government, too, in the rest of America.

Trump on Harvard antisemitism: President Trump appeared on August 21 on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. Hewitt asked Trump about antisemitism on college campuses. Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript:

HH: And will you punish campuses that permit Jewish students to be intimidated? Our alma maters have both become hotbeds of antisemitism – Penn and Harvard. Will you punish campuses that allow Jewish kids to be discriminated against and threatened?

DJT: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Are you kidding? You take a look at Harvard, what they’re doing, and you take a look at the grants they get and all of the money and the billions of dollars that they have, it’s a disgrace. The way they’re treating, especially, I mean, I must say, as I’m reading, and as I’m seeing from reports, especially Jewish students…

HH: Yes.

DJT: They’re treating them horribly.

HH: Yes.

DJT: They’re treating them horribly. It’s not even believable. You know, years ago, and we’ll end at this, but years ago, and not that long ago, I’d say 10, 12, 15 years ago, there was no more powerful, call it a lobby, but there was no more powerful lobby than the Israeli lobby, than the Jewish lobby. Today, it’s almost the opposite. You have people like me that are big supporters, but we’re in a tremendous minority. When guys like Schumer go for Hamas and Hezbollah, I mean, look at Schumer. Why would a Jewish person be voting for Schumer?

HH: It’s pretty incredible.

DJT: No, why would somebody who’s Jewish be voting for these people? If Jewish people vote for her, and I use this expression, they ought to go out, because Kamala is a person that is very anti-Israel, and very anti-Jewish. But she solves that problem by saying her husband’s Jewish, okay? But that doesn’t, her actions are the worst that we’ve ever had. Think of it. You brought this up at the beginning. She wouldn’t even meet. She didn’t want to meet all with Netanyahu when he came to town, wouldn’t go, you know, it’s pretty important when somebody speaks before Congress, wouldn’t even think about seeing him, then going. What she’s doing to Israel is unbelievable. She’s giving the other side tremendous hope, and that hope is going to keep the war going forever.

Thank you: Here at The Editors we can’t promise Klobuchar-Walz-style “Midwestern Common Sense” but we aim for a combination of New England common sense and Brooklyn Jewish seykhl (“Seykhl [שׂכל]: Yiddish word meaning wisdom, commmon sense, prudence.”) This is a reader-supported publication. If you aren’t yet a paid subscriber, please become one today if you can spare the $8 a month or $80 a year. It will assure your continued full access and sustain our continued growth.