Archives for 2024

Well when you put it like that…🤔 pic.twitter.com/WkUOYtStWr

— Kaylan_TX (@Kaylan_TX_) August 19, 2024

I think projecting onto politicians is bad and many of the memes are getting silly…but the right's freakout is plainly centered on how they've adopted a definition of manhood so narrow, violent and insular that it shatters upon seeing one stable, folksy guy who tells Dad jokes.

— zeddy (@Zeddary) August 19, 2024

There is a joke among those of us with ADHD that sometimes people will follow after us even when we have no idea where we’re going. We look confident! — or at least, like we might do something interesting, at any moment, that a curious bystander wouldn’t want to miss. (I personally believe this has been the secret behind a lot of political successes, including both Bill Clinton and Dubya Bush.)

Kerry Howley, at NYMag, has obviously been instructed to bothside be rigidly neutral in her report, and yet:

… There is no obvious connection between an ability to commune with strangers and an ability to govern; one might even be inclined to posit the opposite, in that an easy fluidity masks false intention. The fact remains that Walz is so natural with people that every encounter comes across, through no fault of his own, as trolling his opponent, a man who cannot so much as order a doughnut or answer a question (“What makes you smile?”) without expressing a mysteriously motivated sense of resentment (“I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media”)…

Tim Walz, as anyone who has tried to quote him in print well knows, does not speak in “sentences” nor adhere to a common “grammar.” This is a dream sequence, scenes conjured out of thin air and only later explained. “They always do, Oh, the guy sitting in Racine, Wisconsin, in the bar, what’s really concerning him? I damn sure guarantee you it’s not banning Animal Farm.” You do not know where you are going until you’ve arrived. “You come home from work. You throw the Frisbee to your pup, he gets it, you give your good boy a belly rub,” he said in February, inexplicably. And only then: “Picture that guy” — Trump — “doing anything normal like that.” On August 5, no one outside Minnesota with a healthy relationship to current events knew the name Tim Walz. A few weeks later, he was the best-liked candidate on either ticket in the most high-stakes presidential race anyone could remember…

The ability to be fully present in the selection of banana bread suggests an unusual distribution of attention; indeed, Walz once told a classroom of high-school students that he had ADHD.

“Undiagnosed,” his wife, Gwen, gently added.

“No, I’m not diagnosed,” he said, “but it’s pretty obvious.”…

His political origin story, like all such stories, feels overpolished, a touch too narratively useful, but the facts are there. In 2004, two teenagers, Matt Klaber and Sierra Burkhart, had been denied entry to a pro-Bush event on suspicion of Democratic tendencies. They attempted to get into a second rally with the most inoffensive adult imaginable, universally beloved teacher Tim Walz. They were again denied, and though Walz managed to argue his way in (“I’m in the National Guard, and I’m here to see my commander-in-chief”), he was indignant. The field organizer of the local Kerry campaign was Leah Solo, a former student of Gwen’s. Tim and Gwen folded right in…

show full post on front page

Fun Read: <em>Code Red: Watching the Tim Walz Magic Trick Up Close</em>Post + Comments (99)