The Midwest Is Coming For YOU

 Among the several reasons I had for backing Barack Obama is that he was from the Midwest. I have long had a theory that the Democrats were losing out by ignoring us. Bill Clinton was an almost reasonable facsimile, coming from Arkansas, but he was not Tom Harkin or Gephardt.

Today, it looks like the media noticed what Kamala Harris saw about the Midwest.

Tim Walz embodies the Midwestern values that conservatives never talk about

And if this election is about who gets to define this country and who gets to be defined, picking Walz makes sense. He’s an older white man and he is out there calling Trump and Vance “weird” — aberrations from the norm — and that critique means something coming from him, a white male governor from a Midwestern state. A region so often mocked for its blandness that the blandness, like the Miracle Whip in the potato salads, becomes a binding agent — a cohesiveness we very much need in the vastness and complexity of America.

The Democrats’ Midwestern charm offensive 

Democratic convention, seeking to make history by electing the first woman, a woman of color, president of the United States. In her speech Thursday night, Harris told her personal story as a daughter of immigrants who settled in a working-class neighborhood and who understood injustice and fought for civil rights. Throughout the convention, multiple speakers affirmed the contributions of immigrants at a time when new arrivals in this nation have been dangerously demonized, and which celebrated the first Black president and all the good feeling that still surrounds his time in office. To all of that good feeling, Walz added a key demographic — white men of the Upper Midwest. His message, that they are part of, not threatened by, the advancement of other Americans, is a powerful rebuttal of a Republican campaign fueled by white, male alienation and anger. 

Midwesterners are more than Trump and Vance and MAGA would have us. Plenty of us are appalled when a pundit insults a kid proud of his father. Plenty of us think the world does not rise and set on our heads, but on does on the heads of all the people around us. We might be the last refuge of public decency.

And that is what I think Harris will stand for: the decent people who do hate their fellow citizens, people who want to think the best of our neighbors, and a government not willy-nilly imposing on our fellow citizens.

sch 8/25/24