Editors at National Review Online take stock of the Democrats’ last vice presidential candidate.
Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and erstwhile congressman and vice-presidential hopeful, announced Monday that he is abandoning his campaign for reelection. The about-face by Walz, who launched his bid for a third term in mid-September, was triggered almost entirely by the deluge of bad news about the state’s multibillion-dollar problem with welfare-programs fraud.
Good riddance. Walz was sold to American voters in 2024 not only as a virtuous political leader but as an alternative and better model of manhood. Almost nothing we were told about him in that process was true. His selection by Kamala Harris confirmed all of our worst suspicions about her judgment. The nation will be better off if neither of them holds public office again.
Minnesota’s fraud problem is, as we have written before, far from the only problem with Walz, from his extreme left-wing agenda and ideas to his issues with honesty. But neither is the fraud story simply a run-of-the-mine government scandal of the sort that could happen under even the most diligent chief executive.
Minnesota has opened itself up to abuse in three ways. First, the state provides an unusually extensive array of generous benefits with fairly lax criteria for qualification. The more rivers of money you unsluice, the more opportunities you create to divert the flow. This dynamic has been exacerbated by the deluge of new federal funds to and through the states during and after Covid and the Biden administration, incentivizing them to spend as much as possible as fast as possible. Second, the Walz administration had lax financial controls and such minimal system oversight that a state audit in November found that the governor failed basic internal controls even for his own office. Third, Walz and others in his deep-blue cohort, especially after the George Floyd riots on his watch, presided over a culture in which the fear of being called racist deterred them from looking into fraud rings operating in the state’s Somali community, which brandished such charges against anyone inclined to investigate.
