A good friend is from the town where Walz taught and coached. I reached out to ask my friend if he knew Walz, or had him as a teacher/coach. Here’s the verbatim reply:
Summary
I had Mr. Walz as both a coach and a teacher, plus his wife as a teacher too. I always had good interactions with him (even if I wasn’t being the best kid) and in general he was liked. If you like classic midwestern people then he’s the choice for you (also if you’re like me and despise Trump then he’s even more the choice for you! I haven’t decided on Vance yet but if Trump chose him then I probably don’t like him.). I think he’s great for a politician; well grounded but adaptive too, listens, not arrogant. I’m sad for the mud-slinging he’ll receive and have read several stories from FoxNews to get the dirt but nothing him or I can’t handle. I think he’d be great in this role plus others and I hope the rest of the country realizes that too.
Fun story, I went to DC to lobby on behalf of [trade organization name omitted] several years ago. I was living in CO so I was only assigned to meet with CO representatives but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to meet up with my former coach in DC so I put an inquiry into his general webpage not expecting a return. Instead I got a face to face meeting with him which is more than I can say for 4/5 other representatives we met with who just had their 20-something aids meet with us and nod their heads and take our brochures. I remember how “real” he seemed despite being in his new role. He remembered me and my cousins, showed me the cot he slept on in his office while in DC, listened to my pitches, seemed to already know what I was going to say as if he had done some research, and was exactly the guy I remembered from growing up.
By my reckoning, he reenlisted in 1999, when Gulf War 2 wasn’t a thing.
I’m not clear on whether the promotion came before or after the medical retention board cleared him to serve out the final two years of his contract. I’m also not clear on whether he would have been permitted (or whether he would have needed) to stay beyond those two years in order to fulfill that commitment
And, of course he was not permitted, while on active duty, to publicly come out against the war.
All of my comments above are based on my assumption that his 2005 retirement coincided with the end date of his final enlistment contract. If you can show that assumption to have been faulty, please advise.
Well, no, the Overton window is a valid concept, but what it tells us is that American politics has shifted way to the right in the past half-century. Consider that Nixon established the EPA (which most Republicans today would love to shut down completely) and had proposed a health care plan with similarities to Obamacare that Democrats rejected as not going far enough. Fifty years ago today’s Democrats would be considered at least center-right, and today’s Republicans would be unrecognizable and unbelievable. And you don’t have to go back 50 years – by the standards of most of the civilized world today, the same perspective applies: today’s US Democrats are mostly center-right, and Republicans are mostly insane.
Calling either Harris or Walz “radical left” is just meaningless loony-tunes rhetoric. They’d say that about any Democrat.
By the standards of 1975, though, today’s Democrats are far left on some issues. Support for LGBT rights, legalizing pot, and thinking that racist police brutality is a serious problem are all things that would have been considered extreme fifty years ago. There were certainly no self-identified socialists in Congress at that time.
That’s a valid point. The Overton window is not monolithic, but has shifted one way or the other on specific issues. It’s tended to shift leftward on some social issues, but rightward on most others. In 1975, things like LGBT rights (I don’t think the term “LGBT” even existed then) wasn’t a “leftist” thing – it wasn’t even on the spectrum).
It’s kind of stretched both ways, though. Fifty years ago, I doubt you would have found anyone in Congress who was in favor of single-payer health care OR of privatizing Medicare.
And gay rights were starting to be a thing in the 70s. I remember in 1977 we had a referendum in Eugene, OR trying to outlaw anti-gay discrimination in rental housing. It failed 2-1, but it was a start.
Agreed, but some of the statements I’ve seen from some House members (not sure if they’re considered members of “The Squad” or not) were along the lines of literally “defund the police” and “cancel all mortgages” and similar nonsense. To call this “progressive” is an abuse of the term and falls into the Republican trap of poisoning it. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are progressive and justifiably proud of it. Some of the above-mentioned Congresscritters aren’t “progressive”, they’re far-left lunatics. There are far more lunatics on the far right than on the far left, but there are extremists on both sides and we should acknowledge that.