Democrats Give in to Walzmentum and Prove this Isn’t Barack Obama’s Superficial Party Anymore

There’s not much data suggesting the vice president makes an affirmative impact on the presidential race, and there are surely plenty of Americans waking up this morning and typing “who is Tim Walz” into their search bar, but the veep is important from the perspective of communicating your own values to your party.

A selection of Josh Shapiro, who has not even served one term as Pennsylvania governor, would have been a message from the Democratic Party that we are still stuck in the superficial Obama era where actual qualifications to govern take a backseat to optics and adherence to the Clintonian brand of neoliberalism that has controlled most of the party for three decades now.

That’s all changed. It’s a liberal domestic policy party now.

Joe Biden was the first to shift the Democrats in a more productive and unified direction, as he eschewed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 strategy of “fuck you all who disagree with me but you better vote for me” in favor of a more inclusive plan that brought the left and center-left together. The Bernie/Warren/Biden policy teams of 2020 helped unify the party and was punctuated by this cohesive vision being put into law in the Inflation Reduction Act. Tim Walz is another step in this productive direction.

According to CNN, a source close to the process said, “Harris was drawn to Walz’ executive experience as governor and his record, including his policy positions on paid leave, gun control, reproductive rights, and free school lunches, the source said, as well as his ability to be an effective messenger and draw contrasts with former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.”

In Obama’s superficial Democratic Party, the contrast he draws with Vance would be the headline, and the policy positions would be of secondary consideration because hey we all know that insurance lobbyists are just going to write the laws anyway. This was the fear underlying a Josh Shapiro decision, as his appeal is almost entirely rooted in optics and literally sounding like Obama.

The substance around Shapiro is what made him so radioactive, from his office’s sexual harassment settlement to the Ellen Greenberg case where she was stabbed 20 times and as Attorney General he ruled it a suicide, to his long history of shitty positions on Israel and Gaza, choosing him would indicate that the party still does not view policy as its best route to power. His choice would imply that the Democrats viewed Biden as an anomaly, and his brand of full-contact transactional politics was not welcome in a neoliberal party determined to shape reality however their donors wish them to.

Until the Biden administration, K Street held much more power in the Democratic Party than its rank and file, and it was difficult to find a better juxtaposition of the two main strands of thinking in the party than a first-term governor adored by wealthy interests and a two-term governor who was reelected five times to Congress, went to a public college and taught public high school who is backed by practically everyone to the left of K Street.

Which is why this VP pick felt like it had higher stakes than previous ones. With Kamala Harris accepting her role as the party’s new standard-bearer along with her, shall we say, malleable ideological background, it was an open question which direction the party would travel. Would they continue the Biden tradition of finding ways to bring the party together under a liberal policy platform, or would they revert to the detached neoliberalism by decree that helped lead the party to ruin in 2016?

It’s a brand-new world, and it’s not Barack Obama’s anymore. Kamala Harris is already signaling that Tim Walz will help her “deliver for working families like his.” Time will tell what policies Kamala Harris’s party actually throws her weight behind, but the fact that policy is front-and-center again is the most hopeful sign in the Democratic Party in a generation.