Tim Walz among the "Macho Dems": another post moronic media moment

One of the curious things about Tim Walz's election has been how everybody wants to claim him as one of their own.  Last week it was the Blue Dogs; this week, it's the Tough Urban Guys.

Where to begin with Ryan Lizza's New York Times op-ed piece on The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrats?   

Lizza has been listening to political operatives who lump Tim Walz in with the "Macho Dems." We can't speak to the virtues of the other legislators Lizza writes about, but somehow, Everyman Tim Walz seems thrown in to bolster a point.  We not sure why the tough urban guys Lizza interviews are making their point:

NANCY PELOSI’S carefully crafted introduction to the American people last week seemed to reinforce some stereotypes of the so-called mommy party. On the day she made history as the first woman to be elected speaker, she appeared on the House floor, surrounded by children and bedecked in pearls.

But even as this nurturing image dominated the news, the swearing-in ceremony on Thursday was notable for another milestone in gender politics: the return of the Alpha Male Democrat.

The members of this new faction, which helped the Democrats expand into majority status, stand out not for their ideology or racial background but for their carefully cultivated masculinity.

“As much as the policy positions is the background and character of these Democrats,” says John Lapp, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who helped recruit this new breed of candidate. “So we went to C.I.A. agents, F.B.I. agents, N.F.L. quarterbacks, sheriffs, Iraq war vets. These are red-blooded Americans who are tough.”

Mr. Lapp even coined a term to describe these manly — and they are all men — pols: “the Macho Dems.” . . .

Except, of course, some of the candidates who weren't elected. That FBI agent named Coleen Rowley.  Or disabled war vet Tammy Duckworth.

And we don't recall Tim Walz being recruited to run by the DCCC; when the D-Trip and Walz did connect, he was positioned as a third-tier candidate until late in the cycle.  In Minnesota, the D-Trip pumped a lot more money into the Sixth. Lapp's remarks do provide a glimpse of the mind set that thought that changing Patty Wetterling's public image into an attack dog via television ads was a smart move. Impressive.

But some like 'em tough:

. . .The  architects of this strategy, Representative Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Lapp’s boss, as well as Senator Charles Schumer, are well-known political pit bulls. Mr. Emanuel won his Congressional seat by navigating the ward politics of Chicago’s old-fashioned political machine.

He is missing half of one finger — his aides refer to him as “nine point five” — and swears enough to make a Soprano blush. . . .

When Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Schumer set out to find candidates to run in the red states and districts of the 2006 electoral battleground they sought their own rural and exurban doppelgängers. . . .

. . .Other House members include Minnesota’s Tim Walz, an Army national guardsman; Brad Ellsworth, an Indiana sheriff; and Heath Shuler, a former N.F.L. quarterback from North Carolina. . . .

Only in the world of Washington DC insiders could anyone write that a genial teacher, coach, and sargeant like Tim Walz is Rahm Emanuel's "doppelganger."  Friends and former colleagues reach for the phrase "teddy bear" when describing Walz and his former students tease him about how he never assigned homework. "Pitbull"? Not so much.

Someone should give Lizza the news that Tim Walz is member of NOW as well as of Pheasants Forever. 

Did the young women who ran Walz's campaign construct an "image" of "carefully cultivated masculinity"?  Sure, if one defines macho as a guy who gets up in the middle of the night to change diapers and jokes about being fat and bald. Walz has said Camp Wellstone taught him to stay true to himself and that guy came out.  A down-to-earth everyman; even the New York Times got it right for a while.

We're trying to figure out when we started living by the Macho Dem creed. Without media folks like Lizza and DC operatives,  we might not think in approved patterns of women or of men. We might think about National Guard soldiers as being our friends, family, co-workers and neighbors. We might even remember those soldiers in Iraq who are women.

We'd talk about real things that matter to ourselves and our children, and elect people who will work in our best interests.

We'd remember that if there's a toughness in southern Minnesota and this part of the Midwest, it's the persistance of the notion that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.  It's not "macho" or "dem" but cooperative and practical,  born out of surviving blizzards and tornadoes, of working in the fields and factories, of building co-op creameries, public schools, and the Mayo Clinic, of reviving grassroots and persisting in the face of  impossible odds.

If voters saw a certain toughness in Tim Walz, it was the ethos of their own survival and prosperity.  One of their own, and they elected him to represent them.

OLLIE OX UPDATE:  The Wege takes up Lizza's putzhood in Diapers aren't the only things that need changing.

Comments

[techno]

"We'd remember that if there's a toughness in southern Minnesota and this part of the Midwest, it's the persistance of the notion that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things. It's not "macho" or "dem" but cooperative and practical, born out of surviving blizzards and tornadoes, of working in the fields and factories, of building co-op creameries, public schools, and the Mayo Clinic, of reviving grassroots and persisting in the face of impossible odds."

As someone who grew up in Cottonwood County, I would say this was a nearly perfect sentence about my roots. If I could add a friendly amendment it would read, "a district where grown men are expected to know how to use tools well." The one thing I still cannot get used to is meeting people who think they are superior because they are technologically illiterate.