Tim Walz and the Common Good
Progressives around the world are waking up to a feeling of hope that began when Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic candidate for President, grew as he endorsed his VP Kamala Harris, and has now reached a crescendo as she revealed her running mate will be Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
While it’s been a whirlwind few weeks, the result shouldn’t be all that surprising. Old ads from Harris and Walz show remarkable similarities in their approaches to political issues and communication of their values. They seem to agree that political involvement should be an act of service. Or to borrow a line from my old boss, former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, that politics “can be a force for good in people’s lives”.
Walz is notably a great political communicator and a deeply progressive policy-maker. But what I find most important of all — and what drives both his communications style and policy priorities — is his commitment to the common good. In the ticket’s first video of its new VP candidate, Walz opens with a list of values that have guided him in politics. He says “I learned to be generous towards my neighbours, compromise without compromising my values, and work for the common good.”
The desire to work for the common good should be the foundation of all political action. Yet it’s long been missing from most political discourse. I’m sure many would struggle to define it or even identify it in modern political practice. But to work for the common good is to work for those things that broadly benefit the many rather than serve the narrow interests of the few. While policy details should be debated, we should be able to agree on core values such as freedom and fairness. Working for the common good is all about ensuring we fight for and deliver on those values.
Around the world, progressives and conservatives alike have spent the last two decades doing the opposite. They have used advancements in campaign technology to slice and dice the voting population into interest and identity groups before offering them boutique programs and tax credits in the hope of addressing their niche desires. These same campaign groupings are used to draw a line in the sand on heated political issues so that political parties can use these “wedges” to separate their supporters from those of their opponents.
This intentional effort to divide the public has unsurprisingly coincided with a rise in political polarization. Increasingly voters are joining political operatives in seeing their neighbours as enemies who they are in competition with for public resources and political power — because that’s exactly what they are being told. Instead of building bridges, politics is now all about digging a deeper moat. It is no longer about delivering for the public good. Politics is increasingly about holding on to power for the sake of having it and preventing the other side from getting it.
The selection of Walz sends a different signal to voters. As he is fond of saying, “You don’t win elections to bank political capital — you win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.” To Walz, politics is simply a tool to help make people’s lives a little easier. For him, victory at the polls isn’t the end goal. It is merely the opportunity to begin doing more on behalf of all the people you represent.
This belief has not only led to an impressive record of policy delivery in Minnesota but is also widely believed to be the reason he was tapped to be Harris’s running mate. Walz is said to have told the Vice President that he had no ambitions to seek the presidency himself. Insiders suggest it tipped the scales in his favour, as Harris wanted a partner who saw the vice presidency as a tool to get big things done, instead of just the next step on the way to the presidency.
There is still a lot of runway left in this campaign. But these early days give me great cause for hope that politics can be done differently in 2024 and that there is still room to fight for the common good in political life.
Theresa is a Canadian communications professional who served as the Director of Communications to Ontario’s Deputy Premier and an election speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. She has attended numerous political events in the US, including the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, which saw the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.
