OPINION:
There’s a great scene in “Citizen Kane,” a 1941 film loosely based on the lives of American media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
In the scene, Jedediah Leland (played by the great Joseph Cotton) dresses down Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles): “You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love ’em so much that they ought to love you back. Only you want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way, according to your rules.”
That encapsulates most politicians. They don’t love you, but they want to be loved. They’ll tell you anything you want to hear just so you love them. But they also live on their own terms — your love is a means to an end for them, and if they need to jettison you to get ahead, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.
Politicians are flawed people. Not bad people, but flawed people (well, to be honest, many are bad people; look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). They’re driven to seek complete strangers’ approval — even love. They’re like actors playing a role: They can morph into anyone and can laugh and cry on cue. Add this, though: They’ll lie if that’s what it takes.
Enter Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who is Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. He’s a big ol’ liar. He has created a facade (like an actor), and now he’s playing the role: high school social studies teacher and coach, 25-year military veteran, regular visitor to the local hardware store — an everyman.
But there’s something dark about his lies — about his military record, his procreation tales and his remembrances of things that never happened (but would’ve been way cool if they had).
Mr. Walz has repeatedly exaggerated and embellished his military record. In one speech, trying to bolster his pro-gun control bona fides, he said: “We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
In the 24/7 news cycle, so much flows under the bridge and over the waterfall. But Mr. Walz’s claims that he carried a weapon in war shouldn’t fade away. He didn’t, but he said over and over that he did. A news anchor who made similar “stolen valor” claims, Brian Williams, was exiled to the wilderness for a decade, but Mr. Walz is getting a pass from the liberal media.
Mr. Walz also said he and his wife used in vitro fertilization to conceive their two children, which Democrats say Republicans want to ban. Turns out he didn’t — his wife used intrauterine insemination.
In his defense, Mr. Walz last week actually said people don’t really care if he lied. “I don’t think people care whether I used IUI or IVF when we talk about this. What they understand is Donald Trump would resist those things,” he said in a Fox News interview.
And then Mr. Walz claimed he was in Hong Kong when protesters were slaughtered in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Cool story, except he was in Minnesota. In his defense, he said he could be a “knucklehead at times” — and that was good enough for the media; they just moved on. Not a lie, people — he just misspoke.
Back to “Citizen Kane.” There are people who need an endless amount of love. Elon Musk is one. Kanye West is one. Barack Obama is one. If they weren’t, they’d take their fortunes and disappear.
But politicians are deeply flawed. Every president in the last 35 years has had daddy issues. George H.W. Bush was trying hard to impress his father, Prescott. Bill Clinton’s father left when he was a toddler, and his stepfather was an abusive drunk. George W. Bush, the cokehead owner of a baseball team, was trying to make Dad happy. And Mr. Obama wrote a book titled “Dreams Ffrom My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” That book made him president.
We’re all flawed. We’re all dealing in some way with the sorrows of our youth. And sure, we all want to be loved. But at what cost?
“Love. That’s why he did everything,” Jedediah Leland says about Kane. “He wanted everyone to love him. Guess all he really wanted out of life was love. … That’s the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn’t have any to give.”
Politicians don’t love you — they couldn’t care less about you. They’re playing a role they think you’ll buy, and they’re getting rich doing it.
Love on their own terms, I guess. You decide what to do with that.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X @josephcurl.
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