The Mississippi as center

Some thoughts

One of my most valued erstwhile colleagues (and enduring friends) from the War College does really sophisticated forecasting on all sorts of questions. He responded to something I wrote several months ago by citing evidence the nation is moving back to its more traditional centrist orientation. I told him that was good news in my mind.

I want to offer a different measure of returning to a traditional orientation that hit me within the past half hour. In the last ten months, two completely surprising average guys moved to prominence in our political scene.

I had never heard of Tim Walz before 27 July—and I pay attention to politics. I admit that we visited close friends a year ago in the Twin Cities. At dinner the second evening, Senator Amy Klobachar actually crossed the room in the restaurant where our friends had taken us for dinner. The Senator looked hard at our table, but did not approach (I suppose my husband and I had those cartoon clouds above us saying “Don’t bother as we can’t vote here”) but that is the only link I have to any politico in the state.

My son, a 30 something intense analyst of many sources of information, mentioned Walz as a possible running mate when we were chatting that Saturday afternoon. He had read about Walz’s background and the support the governor has in Minnesota.

More relevant, my son noted that Walz was not an Ivy Leaguer, was a teacher, and a pretty upbeat guy. I wondered if my son had consumed too much coffee (he is in the Pacific Northwest so coffee is more common than a glass of water) because I couldn’t imagine a prominent official in this country from a background more like Bubba in Boise than Cabot from Cornell University. My son recommended I dig into Walz’s background for edification.

This morning, Walz became the vice presidential pick for the Democratic ticket. Putting aside whether he is a liberal (this is such a relative term for our readers from abroad who would rarely consider our “liberals” to be much more than centrists in many countries) or whether he is a cat guy (I did like the clip of him stopping to pet a cat at a factory), Tim Walz is not a coastal figure from the elites in control of both parties.

Kamala Harris attended a Historic Black institution at Howard University in the District of Columbia bedore law school at Hastings (now called University of California SF, I believe); she grew up through Bay Area politics. Democratic standard bearers Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis all attended elite universities, each institution assuring these individuals a robust network of like-experienced connections. Former Vice President Fritz Mondale, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, selected Geraldine Ferraro, a Marymount Manhattan College and Fordham graduate as his running mate in 1984 to break the link to elite networks. But Mondale had been Senator before Veep and Ferraro, a Congresswoman, was a New Yorker, still within the elite to a great extent.

Lest you think it’s only a leftist liberal elite thing, the Republicans show a bit more variety. Donald Trump got a degree from Penn while JD Vance is a Yale Law graduate. Trump’s running mate in 2016 and 2020, Mike Pence, was a pretty regular kinda guy from Indiana who studied there for his higher education. Mitt Romney pursued a traditional Mormon education at Brigham Young before he attended Harvard for his joint MBA-JD but was born into the elite by his father’s role as a well-known Republican governor.

George W. Bush enjoyed wearing cowboy boots on his sprawling ranch but went to Yale and Harvard. Bush’s vice President, Dick Cheney, originally flunked out of college but ultimately was pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Wisconsin when he joined the political world in the 1960s under tutelage of the Princetonian Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney, of course, had also been Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff, a Wyoming Congressman, and SecDef before running a major defense contractor.

Arguably the 1996 Republican ticket of Kansan Bob Dole (Washburn University BA and LLM) and Jack Kemp (Occidental College) was the most comparable “Middle America” ticket nearly thirty years ago in terms of elite pizzazz. Both Kemp and Dole were scene as average Joes, even though Dole was Senate Minority Leader and had run as Gerald Ford’s veep two decades earlier. Kemp may have been the country’s most public cheerleader for the flat tax but made his mark not as a politico but as a Buffalo Bills quarterback in the 60s.

Whether Walz’s Chadron State University undergrad or Mankato State graduate degrees are enough to satisfy voters is as yet unknown. But so many critics of our political system kvetched over the past several elections about people not being “real” which is apparently never a description of this guy. Academic degrees do not a success make, of course, but they offer interesting contrasts in this year’s election. Walz popularized “weird” for widespread use, he does guns, smiles a lot, likes cats, survived teaching in a public school, served as an enlisted guy in the National Guard for more than twenty years, and got school lunches funded. Those are hardly elitist credentials. They are real people issues, actually.

The other unexpected figure, of course, is the current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. A lawyer from Louisiana, Johnson studied not at an Ivy or Oxford as his Senate colleague John Kennedy did. Johnson is an LSU graduate through and through. A relative backbencher with strong Christian credentials, Johnson appeared from nowhere when the Republican caucus was casting about for someone foolish enough to assume Kevin McCarthy’s commitments from January 2023 to assume the Speakership.

Johnson has actually survived fairly well. No one should doubt his profound commitment to trying to craft the nation into something it never was but he has also been surprisingly adapt at passing required legislation to prevent a government shutdown multiple times and to draft a supportable budget. He has done all of that under threat of far right elements wielding the cudgels that brought down the previous speaker. Yet, Johnson does not seem to have much of a visible link to these caucus members except as a Republican who dislikes the opposition and wants to make this a Christian nation. Whether or not one likes his politics, one must give him due at choosing his battles carefully. I doubt most of us thought he would still have the gavel nine and a half months after assuming it. He is definitely rightwing but he can see that he must make deals, a position the majority of his party does not understand in a nation split 49-47% as I discussed yesterday.

Johnson and Walz are radically different guys for lots of policy reasons but they indicate a recognition on the part of both parties that the “fly over” people in this country vote. Eliism, according to the anecdotes we hear, bothers a hell of lot of folks more than it assures voters either that the everyone’s interests will be considered in our country or we are en route to a better place.

So I come back to my friend’s assessment about the center. The Mississippi River and environs are the center in so many ways. It is a big country and a long, wide river. Louisiana is way down south near the mouth while St. Paul or Mankato is north where the river begins. Some times the flood plain is fertile with magnificent agriculture while sometimes it floods horribly. But, that River is what makes us who we are. People on the Gulf Coast, the Pacific Rim, and the Atlantic shore need remember that as forgetting it can come at a tremendous cost.

Thank you considering Actions today or any way. I appreciate each and every reader but cherish those who support me financially through a subscription. Please feel free to circulate this column to anyone who might enjoy it. My aspiration is to expand our dialogue on issues that matter.

Have made it through seven and a half months of pictures, trashing less than desirable ones. Today’s shot is two aging cats we see on our walks occasionally here in Eastport. Their expressions say it all!

Be well and be safe. FIN