Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz introduces himself to the United States

One of the best inventions of the Swedish welfare state is the lunch of the day. This concept doesn’t really exist in the United States. Fast food and three-course business lunches are available here. But not a hot meal for 79 SEK with a gooseberry in a plastic bottle.

The new Democratic vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, who spoke in Chicago last night, may be the American political equivalent of today's lunch.

Walz is often presented as a teacher and football coach, his profession before becoming a full-time politician. But that may not be the modern educational tradition he primarily embodies in the Democratic campaign.

President Kamala Harris She is more typical of the learned meritocracy of today’s party elite. She is the daughter of a radical Stanford economist. Tim Walz, for his part, was educated at Chadron State College in Nebraska, the boiled beetroot of the college world.

“I had 24 classmates,” Walz said last night, in a dig at J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee who holds a law degree from one of the world’s top universities.

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Since 2018, Walz has been governor of Minnesota, where about a third of the population has family roots in Scandinavia. Walz himself is of Swedish descent. One of his signature reforms in Minnesota is free breakfast and lunch for school students. An innovation that has become so popular among students that it threatens the state budget.

It is also called In the Twelve Penny Opera: First comes food, then manners. In this motto, Waltz represents the jaw and Attorney General Harris represents the rule of law. They make a great duo, with Harris the sophisticated chef and Waltz the father of two who prefers Swedish tacos without seasoningor.

But to hold on to the White House in 2025, Harris and Walz must deliver both food and morale, both providing comfort to the struggling industrial working class of the Midwest and carrots to the academic left of the urban coastal scene—one who is passionate about progressive identity politics and acceptable living conditions for the destitute population of Gaza.

Biden—in addition to the dilemmas of his age—has had increasing difficulty in putting this equation together. He has struggled to express sympathy for the Palestinians and has no language to defend abortion. Tim Walz has no such problems. He loudly declared last night that the state should be concerned about intruding on Americans’ bedrooms. His strained clarity will be a great asset to the slightly more elegant orator Harris.

Waltz is not a celebrity. American politician. Many commentators initially thought Harris had chosen him because they fit together well as a couple. But Walz has quickly proven himself to be a formidable campaign politician on the national stage. His home state of Minnesota may just be an example of how Democrats can marry Scandinavian-tinged social welfare policy with the multicultural reality of America.

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At least that’s what happened in downtown Minneapolis, the big city and progressive powerhouse of the Falls. It was there, in the downtown area of ​​Riverside Plaza, that the Swedes once settled and organized as a political force. Today, the Somali diaspora has taken over the streets and positions of trust in local politics.

Ilhan Omar, the controversial Muslim congresswoman, is just at Riverside Plaza in Minneapolis. Her constituents? The majority are descendants of Swedish immigrants. “White aunties,” one of her colleagues affectionately told DN.

But the Minnesota Democratic Party disagrees. It’s called the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Democratic Party, and as the name suggests, it’s a mix of urban and rural interests. And that’s probably exactly the mix Harris wants to bring to the White House.

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