TIM WALZ: Kamala Picked Me For Being Pretty Fly For a White Guy.

What’s mystifying is why Walz would admit publicly that Harris was pursuing a race-based calculation in her running mate rather than, y’know, finding the best person for the job. And not just in the one-heartbeat-from-the-presidency sense either, but also in the ability to campaign and to compete against J. D. Vance.

Speaking of which:

Walz had good reason to fear Vance, who easily outclassed him in the debate. The question is why Harris didn’t pick someone who didn’t need to fear a debate. Harris had Josh Shapiro, a confident and charismatic governor in a state she desperately needed to win, who had easily beaten his Republican opponent by appealing to the demo she needed. Harris could have selected Gavin Newsom, or Gretchen Whitmer, or practically anyone else than the bumbling Walz.

That’s not the worst aspect of this admission. It exposes Democrats’ cynicism about white male voters in general by just assuming that they needed a “permission structure” for their choice at the voting booth. What kind of thinking is that? It reminds me of the dumb Harris/Walz ad with Julia Roberts that was premised on the idea that white women weren’t empowered to vote for Harris unless they got secret signals from celebrities that assured them their ballot choice would be secret. It’s insanely infantilizing and practically sneers at these women as mindless idiots who desperately need progressives to remind them of what they already know.

Walz makes it worse by claiming that he could “code talk to White guys,” which (a) is terribly patronizing as well, and (b) not at all what Walz accomplished on the campaign trail. Walz came across as a progressive elitist who thought he could fake his way through the campaign as an outdoorsy dad, having trouble loading his own shotgun during a media photo op.

Oh sure, you say all that. But at the end of the day, the man could sure run a mean Pick Six.