“I had the last Walz with you…”

Don’t know why, but the 1967 song The Last Waltz has been stuck in my mind ever since Kamala Harris announced her choice of running mate.

Of the foursome now vying for the top two jobs in Western politics, only Trump is old enough to remember the song, and at some point I fully expect him to say something like: “This last Walz won’t last for ever.” I know from personal experience that puns based on people’s surnames are as irresistible as they are silly.

So, by the evidence of the on-going campaign in the US, are personal attacks. That’s most unfortunate because both Harris and Walz are less vulnerable to slings and arrows than Trump and Vance.

Harris hasn’t done enough in her personal life to cancel out the advantages conferred by her sex and race. That these incidentals are seen as advantages raises uncomfortable questions about the American electorate and indeed about the very idea of universal franchise. But such things are what they are, and an ethnic woman gets a head start in any race.

As to Walz, he comes across as everyone’s favourite uncle and has a CV to match. A Midwesterner, educated at a state college, married to the same woman for 30 years, NCO in the National Guard, schoolteacher and football coach, a long political career as first a congressman, then Minnesota governor. Though raised Catholic, he later converted to evangelical Lutheranism, a more mainstream religion in the US. If there has ever existed a set of chinkless armour, Walz is wearing it.

Any personal attacks against him, or Harris for that matter, are bound to backfire. For example, saying, as Trump does, that Harris discovered her black identity only to score political points is counterproductive. So what else is new?

Of course, Kamala had to play the only two cards in her hand, race and sex. What else could she boast of? A record of statesmanship? Success at securing the border? Towering intellect? Oratorial talent? Don’t make me laugh.

And Vance is making a bad mistake by attacking Walz’s military record, which, unlike his own, included no combat postings in 25 years. If I were Walz, I’d barge through the door thus opened by mentioning Trump’s rather iffy deferments during the Vietnam war.

In short, neither Harris nor Walz has any glaring personal weaknesses that can be exploited for political gain. Yet that doesn’t mean they have no exploitable weaknesses altogether.

Trump and Vance should take their cue from the recent general election in Britain. Starmer won his landslide by the strategy of doing nothing, but doing it well. He pointed out every weakness in the Tory record, and there were many. But at the same time Starmer was reticent about the policies he’d adopt if elected, and how they’d make things better.

Instead, he was mouthing woke platitudes and bien pensant generalities, studiously avoiding any specifics. He even refused to give a straight answer to the question of whether or not women have penises, saying instead that 99.99 per cent don’t. That slandered some 35,000 British lasses who didn’t deserve such calumny. But the Tories failed to drag Starmer out into the open and bombard him with demands to specify his policies on everything that matters.

Since the media in the US are even more left-wing than in Britain, the Republican ticket must be extra-sharp to counteract all the free publicity the Democrats are getting. Shouting that Kamala isn’t as black as she paints herself or that Walz never fired a shot in anger isn’t going to do it. Attacking them on policies may – and should.

For example, Walz, good all-around egg that he is, has had an appalling record as Minnesota governor. Under his tender care, per-capita GDP went down (dropping below the national average for the first time) and crime went up.

When Minnesota police were being overrun during the 2020 BLM riots, they pleaded with the governor to send in the National Guard. Yet Walz sat on his thumbs for three days, and only managed to stop himself from taking the knee by a huge mental effort. (Starmer succumbed to that temptation at the same time.)

His wife, meanwhile, went on record claiming that, in the midst of the riots, she stood by an open window, breathing in joyously the aroma of burning cafés and shops. If that’s Minnesota’s first family, I wonder what its last family is like.

As to the religious faith Walz wears on his sleeve, I’d be curious to know how he reconciles it with his secular policies and beliefs. For example, he signed a law permitting abortion up to the moment of birth, which even evangelical Lutheranism must see as infanticide.

Under his aegis, Minnesota hospitably invited children from all over the country to come for “gender-affirming care”, meaning puberty blockers and castration. He also ordered that tampons be provided in the boys’ lavatories at all high schools. That has earned him the nickname of ‘Tampon Tim’ in some quarters.

I’d relish watching him squirm when asked how many American boys have periods. That’s one of those questions to which there are no good answers, sort of like “Mr Smith, when did you stop beating your wife?” or, for that matter, “Do British women have penises?”

During her tenure in the US Senate, Kamala Harris was rated as its most left-wing member, which is saying a lot in the context of the overall leftward shift in US politics.

Then it should almost go without saying that both Harris and Walz are exponents of the critical race theory and the DEI catechism. This means that, if he’s to be consistent, Walz ought to hate himself. After all, he is a straight white male, and a Christian Midwesterner to boot, which is to say the bogeyman of his ideology.

Many Americans regard Trump as toxic, and they’d vote even for Che Guevara if he were the Democratic candidate. Nevertheless, however low my opinion of the American (or any other Western) electorate may be, I don’t believe most voters are as extreme Left as Harris and Walz.

The task Trump and Vance face is forcing their opponents away from generalities and out into specifics. Both men’s records stack up favourably against Harris and Walz, much more so than their personalities. And Donald? No puns of Walz’s name, please. That’s neither grown-up nor clever.

P.S. Speaking of left-wing politicians, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo displayed her cosmopolitan savvy by slipping the ubiquitous English word into her otherwise French-language diatribe.  

“F*** reactionaries, f*** the extreme right, f*** all those who want to shut us in a war of everyone against everyone,” she said in an interview to Le Monde, the French answer to The Guardian. One can only regret the paucity of the French language, with politicians having to rely on English to express their innermost convictions. Still, it’s good to see that the much-vaunted French sense of style extends even to Lefties.