Sixteen years after Republicans unveiled vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as America’s “hockey mom,” Democrats introduced their own relatively unknown VP pick with a spin on the same folksy framing: here is America’s football dad, Tim Walz.
Walz, the popular governor of Minnesota and former high school teacher and coach, formally accepted the vice presidential nomination with a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that was heavy on football metaphors that highlighted his “everyman” demeanor.
He walked onto the stage to a standing ovation as thousands of convention goers held up cutouts of his face and signs that read “Coach Walz.” He told the country: “I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks.”
Leaning on his roots as a Midwesterner, Walz delivered a speech filled with broadsides against Donald Trump and the Republicans interspersed with sports analogies that served to remind the exuberant attendees that the race remains, by all accounts, a toss up.
Sarah Palin being introduced at the 2008 Republican National Convention; Tim Walz on Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention.
AP, Getty Images
“It’s the fourth quarter, we’re down a field goal but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball,” Walz said to close his relatively short — by this convention’s standards —speech. “We’re driving down the field and boy do we have the right team.”
“One inch at a time, one yard at a time, one phone call at a time, one door knock at a time, one five dollar donation at a time,” he said. “We’ve got 76 days. That’s nothing. There’ll be time to sleep when you’re dead. We’re going to leave it on the field.”
It was an address that called back to the 2008 Republican convention, when a then-unknown governor by the name of Sarah Palin rocketed to national attention with a barnburner of a speech remembered for her line: “They say the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull — lipstick.”
Walz had a similar duty on Wednesday. Still unfamiliar to the broader public, he was there to introduce himself to the American people as both a happy warrior and someone who could take the fight to the Republicans.
He led the audience to cheers of “we’re not going back” and laid out an abbreviated policy plan that he told Democrats to “send to your undecided relatives.”
Like Palin in 2008, Walz is also a state leader with rural appeal. He was propelled to the top of the Democratic ticket after rising to national prominence for dubbing former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as “just weird”—a phrase Harris’ campaign has been quick to adopt.
But while Walz and Palin may have similarities “on the surface,” their records show starkly different trajectories for their futures, experts told Newsweek.
Minnesota Governor and 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz speaks on the third day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, » …