By Kellen Browning
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota defended himself against Republican attacks on his military service record earlier this week in his first solo campaign event since being named Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate.
Speaking at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees convention in Los Angeles, Walz responded directly for the first time to the claims pushed by former President Donald Trump’s campaign that he exaggerated his military record to suggest he had served in combat when he had not, and that he left his Army National Guard unit to run for public office in order to avoid deploying to Iraq.
“I am damn proud of my service to this country,” Walz said Tuesday. “And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person’s service record.”
Walz retired from the National Guard in 2005 after 24 years, a year before his artillery battalion deployed to Iraq. At the time of his retirement, soldiers knew a deployment was possible, but the actual orders came months after Walz, then 41, had already left to run for a seat in the House of Representatives. On Tuesday, he framed that decision as another act of service.
“In 2005, I felt the call of duty again, this time paying service to my country in the halls of Congress,” Walz said. Without referring to him by name, he addressed Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, who has led the “stolen valor” attacks against him and who also served in the military.
“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,” Walz said.
Walz did not directly address Vance’s claims that he had misrepresented his record to include combat.
Speaking about gun control in 2018, when he was a member of the House of Representatives, Walz said “we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.”
He deployed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but did not serve in a combat zone. The Harris campaign has said that Walz misspoke.
Absent a roaring crowd of more than 10,000 packed inside a stadium or airplane hangar and without serving as Harris’ opening act — the norm for the Democratic ticket over the past week — Walz gave a 20-minute address to union members that was slightly less raucous than his previous speeches. But his tone and demeanor otherwise mirrored last week’s series of appearances.
Walz, a former teacher — and, as he noted, the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan — framed himself and Harris as warriors for the working class, highlighting pro-labor bills he signed in Minnesota and his support for federal legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a labor rights bill.
By contrast, Walz painted Trump and Vance as out-of-touch elitists.
“Can you picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s, trying to run a McFlurry machine?” Walz asked, invoking Harris’ time working at the fast-food chain when she was a student. “The only thing those two guys know about working people is how to work to take advantage of them.”
As governor, Walz’s own record on labor is not entirely without blemishes. Last year, he vetoed a bill that would have guaranteed a minimum wage and other labor protections to gig drivers who work for Uber and Lyft, siding with the ride-sharing companies’ arguments that the minimum pay was too high for the region and would have required them to curtail their businesses in Minnesota and pass on costs to riders. (He signed a similar bill with a lower base pay rate this year.)
Walz is coming off a string of battleground state rallies that welcomed him to the ticket, and the Los Angeles stop was the first of many events for him this week. He was set to attend a fundraiser in Newport Beach, California, also on Tuesday, and attend fundraisers in Denver, Boston, Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York, later in the week.
Harris’ choice of Walz has seemed to turbocharge the enthusiasm unleashed by her own candidacy. He has leaned on his Midwestern appeal on the stump, while promising he and Harris would bring joy and lightness back to politics.
Supporters who attended last week’s rallies said they viewed Walz as “America’s dad,” and they were invigorated by the progressive policies he has signed into law in Minnesota.
But his rollout has not come without scrutiny, some of it inaccurate or misleading. Republicans have seized on his handling of the riots that broke out in Minneapolis in 2020 after a police officer was filmed murdering George Floyd, arguing he did not move quickly enough to quell the unrest, looting and arson, and was slow to send in the National Guard. They have derided some of his policies, such as the bill he signed last year requiring menstrual products to be available in the bathrooms of all schools to accommodate transgender students.
Above all, they have hammered Walz over his military service.
The attacks are reminiscent of the sort deployed against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, when he was the Democratic nominee running against President George W. Bush. Chris LaCivita, the co-chair of Trump’s campaign, was also one of the architects of the “Swift Boat” attacks against Kerry, which successfully cast doubt on his military service in Vietnam.
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