OPINION:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will address the Democratic National Convention later today to accept his party’s nomination for vice president. Expect his words to be laced with deception and puffery.
This has become a habit for Mr. Walz, who has a long history of adjusting facts to suit his needs. In 1995, when he was teaching high school in Nebraska, a besotted, 31-year-old Mr. Walz got behind the wheel of his silver Mazda and blitzed down the road at 96 mph, drawing a lawman’s attention.
While in custody, a hospital blood test confirmed Mr. Walz had a blood alcohol level of .128 — far above the legal limit for driving. These days, a single drunken-driving arrest may not be politically disqualifying if the public recognizes the offender has set himself straight.
Not Mr. Walz. In explaining away his dangerous indiscretion years later, Mr. Walz dispatched aides with a cover story.
“He couldn’t understand what the officer was saying to him,” his campaign manager told a Minnesota newspaper, the Rochester Post Bulletin, in 2006. The new claim was that the former Guardsman went deaf from his military service, causing a misunderstanding. His media defenders insisted Mr. Walz wasn’t drunk at all.
Mr. Walz is not deaf, and he wasn’t content to let his record of honorable service in the National Guard speak for itself. The Kamala Harris campaign, in announcing Mr. Walz as the VP pick, described him as a “retired command sergeant major.”
While he briefly held that rank in an acting capacity, Mr. Walz was demoted to master sergeant at retirement because he shirked his service commitment to avoid a combat deployment. In March 2005, Mr. Walz put out a news release acknowledging that the deployment was coming. He said at the time, “I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called upon.”
A few months later, he turned in his stripes before the commitment was fulfilled and before the final deployment order arrived. Mr. Walz now says he served “in support of Operation Enduring Freedom,” suggesting to casual listeners that he served in combat in Afghanistan. His only overseas deployment was to Italy — far from the front lines.
At the convention, excited Democrats hold signs celebrating “Coach Walz,” but even that title reflects the tendency toward resume inflation. “I feel like one of my roles in this now is to be the anti-Tommy Tuberville, to show that football coaches are not the dumbest people,” Mr. Walz said last week.
He’s putting himself on the same level as the Alabama Republican senator who spent two decades as head coach for NCAA Division I teams, including Auburn University in its 13-0 season in 2004. Mr. Tuberville won the Southeastern Conference’s Coach of the Year award twice and served as president of the American Football Coaches Association.
By contrast, Mr. Walz volunteered his time “sharing responsibilities” as defensive coordinator for the Mankato West High School team after his arrest forced him to abandon his teaching job in Nebraska.
Helping out as an assistant coach is laudable. The problem is that Mr. Walz embellished his role by referring to himself as “the coach” and pretending he’s in the same league as Mr. Tuberville.
Mr. Walz’s compulsive desire to appear to be something he’s not says a lot about his character. It’s not a trait suitable to a leader aspiring to serve in the White House.
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