Yearning to Turn the Page

By ART CULLEN

Gus Walz put me in the tank when he sprung from his seat crying, “That’s my dad!” nnTim Walz, the football coach and governor from Mankato, had just told his family that he loved them in front of God and the Democratic National Convention.

Gus, 17, has special needs. His parents call them his “special powers.” Indeed.

It was real and honest. Genuine. That’s what America craves right now, not to mention love sweet love.

There it was live on TV, a nation coming together around this kid.

Count me among the formerly skeptical.

Walz ticked me off last year during a few forays south into Iowa. The governor pimped us for going backwards so fast, which we deserve, but I sort of resented that familiar Minnesota smugness.

Plus, Walz hails from Nebraska. He couldn’t help himself. We did ban books. We do undermine child nutrition. We shame gays. We outlawed abortion. Right-wingers have been on a steamroll here for a decade.

Gotcha guv. Heard ya loud and clear. Didn’t really need the reminder. Oh, is it time for you to go now? Long drive to St. Paul ahead, and I-35 can be a bearcat. See ya.

Then he got on TV in just the past several weeks calling out Donald Trump and JD Vance for being weird, which they are. Few east of Eau Claire had heard of him. You should pick the governor of key swing state Pennsylvania or the astronaut from Arizona, not the pudgy bald guy, I thought. Whoa, Betty, was I off again.

Kamala Harris realized that America is sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Fear. Division. The pandemic. Isolation. Frustration. That has been our politics.

Enough already.

Let’s go get a turkey leg at the state fair.

She chose Walz, the Midwestern dad who does goofy videos with his 23-year-old daughter, Hope, conceived through fertility treatments. He managed to get elected to six terms as a congressman from a red district just north of the Iowa border. He worked across the aisle as governor when Republicans controlled the state senate. He understands small towns left behind — his graduating class in Nebraska numbered 24. (None of them went to Yale, he went to Chadron State.)

His schtick is being the good neighbor and wisecracking coach.

Harris and Walz aim to turn the page.

“Our nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward – not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans,” Harris declared in her nomination speech on Thursday.

The politics of fear is being confronted head-on.

Switching to a campaign that is able to laugh is a relief from the morosity of the past eight years in Iowa, for sure. We miss the friendship of neighbors set apart by politics. Walz reminds us that neighbors in small towns look out for each other. We work past differences for the common good. More of that, please.

That’s a big reason Harris now leads Trump in key swing states. We want to shed those blues. The economy is pretty decent. Inflation is coming down. The Federal Reserve will loosen up interest rates just in time for the election.

Trump is in deep trouble.

Voters want to cheer something good. When trolls jeered Gus Walz on social media, they were quickly shut down as gross and vile. The good in America insists on bubbling up. I think that is what we’re witnessing. We are seeing a nation that wants to shed the heavy yoke of the past few years.

I would guess most Iowans think that the rig is off the rails. At the moment Gus Walz rose to shout “That’s my dad!” I thought for the first time that if the Democrats had tried, they could win Iowa this time around. This is what we have been looking for. Something real. Something maybe even true. America is amazing that way.

Art Cullen is editor and publisher of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2024

Populist.com