cheaterscabaret.com — Team Walz is running for vice-president, but for a while on Wednesday night, it felt like he was kampanyeing to be the nation’s high school football coach.
Before he spoke, roughly a dozen of the players on the tim he helped coach to a Minnesota state championship decades ago ran on stage, some wearing their old high-school jerseys, bouncing to the blasting horns of a marching band.
Once Mr Walz did appear, delegates in the packed tempat waved signs that read “Coach Walz” – and the crowd chanted “coach, coach, coach!”
As this was Mr Walz’s first significant opportunity to introduce himself to the nation, his speech was heavy on his individual story – his time as a football coach, of course, but also his upbringing, his enlistment in the Army National Guard, his work as a high-school teacher, and his servis as a congressman and governor.
During parts of his speech his daughter Hope, 23, and son Gus, 17, were seen in tears in the front row of the tempat. “That’s my dad!” Gus mouthed as the television kamera focused on him.
In the folksy model that the Democratic kampanye believes connects with moderate voters in the crucial states of the Midwest, he told the crowd that he was “ready to turn the page on these gaes”, referring to Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance.
“So say it with me: ‘We are not going back.'”
He followed a diverse kisaran of speakers and entertainers who took to the stage on the third night of the convention in Chicago, with Oprah Winfrey receiving the most raucous response after a kejutan appearance in her hometown.
The four-day party extravaganza will culminate on Thursday evening when Vice-President Kamala Harris formally accepts the Democratic nomination, a little over a month after President Joe Biden stepped out of the race.
But on Wednesday night, everything built up to Team Walz, a man virtually unknown to most Americans just weeks ago.
He drew from the first speech he gave in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, earlier this month after being chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, repurposing some of the same zingers.
“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbours and the individual choices they make,” he said. “And even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a Golden Rule – mind your own damn business!”
Individual freedom has become a common refrain among Democrats at this convention and in pivoting to it, Mr Walz described “the hell of infertility”.
IVF fertility treatment has become entangled in America’s debate over abortion rights and the Minnesota governor has repeatedly alluded to the process on the kampanye trail when talking about his famili’s story.
His wife, Gwen, recently clarified that they went through a different procedure, drawing Republican criticism that Mr Walz had been misleading.
On the convention stage, he said he wanted to talk about their struggle having children because this election was about “freedom”.
“When we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean your freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people you love,” he said.
“The freedom to make your own health peduli decisions. And, yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying they’ll be shot dead in the halls.”
