Tearing Down This Walz

Plus: Veterans of the John Kerry campaign open up on how Team Harris should respond to attacks on Tim Walz’s military service.

Pretty good numbers on the Republicans for Harris Zoom rally last night, per NPR:

During a meeting billed as an online rally for “Republicans for Harris,” former elected officials and party leaders made a case for supporting Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday night.

Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, once a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was an adviser to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6th insurrection. He described Trump as an “inveterate liar” and a “conspiracy theorist.” . . . “There’s no way as a Republican that I could vote for anybody who’s anti-Constitution,” Riggleman said.

More than 70,000 people participated in the call. Happy Wednesday.

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(Composite / Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Shutterstock)

No Stolen Valor

By now, you’ve probably bumped into the “stolen valor” accusations currently swirling around Tim Walz, which JD Vance has made a centerpiece of his campaign attacks. Walz’s decision to retire from the National Guard in 2005 to run for Congress around the time his unit was deploying to Iraq has come under scrutiny. So have comments the Minnesota Democrat has made since entering politics, in which he appeared to embellish or overstate aspects of his service.

These attacks have garnered enough attention that Walz himself felt obliged to respond during a rally Tuesday:

These guys are even attacking me for my record of service, and I just want to say: I’m proud to have served my country, and I always will be. . . . And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person’s service record. To anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words: Thank you for your service and sacrifice.”

Vance responded to the governor’s remarks on Tuesday by thanking him for his service—and then calling him a liar.

If you’re lost in all this, Will Selber has a great piece up at the site today cutting through the noise. Selbers goes chapter and verse through the controversy, drawing on his own lengthy military experience. You should read the whole thing, but here’s just a nugget:

Real talk: Over the course of a military career, you will make friends, but there will also be people with grudges against you, bad feelings, and axes to grind. That’s the nature of the job, especially in the National Guard, where soldiers serve together in the same units for the majority of their careers. On active duty, service members often rotate in and out of units scattered across the board. So it’s quite common to find unhappy former colleagues and comrades to opine about anyone with a long service record, even someone generally admired and beloved. . . .

Yes, Walz and his campaign were not completely precise in characterizing his rank upon retirement. Walz served as a CSM but was reduced in rank—which is not the same thing as being demoted for cause—because he failed to complete some coursework. (One more bit of real talk: The required coursework might well have been a huge waste of time. Military coursework is often superficial and useless. But checking those boxes for promotion is an important rung on the meritocratic ladder.)

To retire as a command sergeant major in the Minnesota National Guard requires completing some coursework which may or may not actually be useful.

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Kerry Vets On How to Respond

For some longtime Democrats, these attacks on Walz have dredged up painful memories of the “Swift Boat” allegations that proved such a headache for John Kerry 20 years ago. We caught up with a few veterans of that campaign this week to get their take on the attacks and how they’d advise the Harris camp to respond. 

“I’m having pretty bad flashbacks about 2004, and it seems pretty troubling,” former Kerry research director Michael Gehrke told The Bulwark. “But it also seems like Democrats have recognized it—the Harris/Walz campaign recognizes it, and they’re doing their best to stay in front of it and knock it down and point it out for what it is.”

Back in ‘04, the flurry of testimony from a group of Vietnam vets about Kerry’s record of decorated service, as well as their disgruntled critiques of Kerry’s later antiwar activism, scuffed the then-Senator’s war-hero status. His campaign was knocked off balance that summer, unsure whether to dignify the attacks with attention, and fretting about spending significant money over the summer that they might need later. Aides were divided over how to respond.

“At the end of the day, in our data, that stuff didn’t hurt him in the general election,” said former Kerry senior advisor and longtime Democratic operative Bob Shrum. “But what it did was create problems internally for the campaign in August.”

Shrum commended Walz’s de-escalatory rhetoric of praising Vance’s own service in response to the attacks: “I think from Walz that’s the right response.” But he argued that the rest of the Harris campaign apparatus should respond more aggressively.

“You have to go to advertising. You’re gonna have to hit back harder than [Walz] has to on your paid media,” Shrum said. “And I wouldn’t be purely defensive. I’d answer the thing quickly, move and pivot—there are so many things you can do about Trump and military service, from bone spurs to suckers and losers—I mean, it’s just endless.”

Gehrke likewise suggested turning the script on Vance and Trump, noting that Team Harris/Walz has one advantage for making this pivot that Team Kerry didn’t.

“In John Kerry’s case, it was an independent group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” making the attacks, he noted. “And that made it a little tricky because, you know, the Bush campaign themselves had tried to distance [themselves] from it, and the press by and large bought into that. In this case, it’s front and center, it’s clear who’s attacking Tim Walz’s record, and it’s JD Vance. So JD Vance has to own these attacks, and he has to own the fallout from them.”

The Harris campaign, Gehrke said, should question how seriously Vance “actually treats service to the country: Is it important to him or is it just something to use as a political chip?”

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Quick Hits

WELL, THIS IS GROSS: Team Trump’s kitchen-sink approach to blunting Harris’s momentum is going to some truly ugly places:

Agitating against immigrants has been a key plank of the Trump platform since 2015. Even so, this is shocking stuff: an uncut embrace of the white-nationalist great replacement theory that accuses the Democratic party of trying to destroy the culture of white America via unchecked immigration. Note too that this isn’t off-book ranting from Trump himself, but a campaign message put out on official channels by his staff—not a momentary nasty indulgence, but part of a deliberate strategy.

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WE DIDN’T REALIZE KNEES BENT THAT FAR: Four years ago, Donald Trump tried to bully then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey into handing him a win in a state Joe Biden carried by just a few thousand votes—then turned him into a pariah in his own party when Ducey insisted on following the law.

Yesterday, Ducey sheepishly endorsed Trump anyway. “I will be voting for Republicans up and down the ballot in November,” Ducey wrote. “Differences aside, there is too much on the line and only a Republican in the White House and a majority in the House and US Senate can ensure it.”

Ducey’s not the only guy feeding the mouth that bites him these days. Georgia’s Brian Kemp, another governor who earned Trump’s ire by doing his job in 2020, proclaimed last week he was still voting for Trump—in response to a string of unprovoked attacks from the former president against him and his wife.

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FROM OUR KEYBOARDS TO HER EARS: Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report in Axios today that Kamala Harris will introduce parts of her economic agenda with a policy speech Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina. The speech will emphasize helping Harris’s own middle-class roots and focus on helping the middle class by lowering costs of healthcare, housing, and food. It will be future-oriented, too: As Allen and VandeHei put it, “she wants to be not-Biden on inflation by proposing clearer, more urgent solutions.”

Furthermore, “a big part of the Harris plan is to unapologetically change some of her more liberal positions, and claim her White House experience helped change her mind.” She will also “emphasize her record as a prosecutor,” and will “present plans to help entrepreneurs and small businesses.”

Here in Morning Shots, we’ve called for policy proposals from Vice President Harris, and we’ve urged a clear move to the center and a focus on the future. Maybe she’s a subscriber?

—William Kristol

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