Doesn’t Anyone Care About the Walz China Stuff?

Here we sit, three days from the Super Bowl of American politics. For a year, your humble correspondent has been staring, unblinking, straight into the carnival-cum–melting-down reactor of American democracy. He has covered debates, speculated on vice-presidential nominees, survived two conventions (in one case only with chemical aids), and even written a little about politics’ redheaded stepchild, policy, all while editing about 20,000 words of copy a week. What insights has this year of torment, this great spirit quest in the wastes of American public life, brought? What questions remain unanswered?

Well, for one thing: Why doesn’t anyone care about Tim Walz?

I don’t care that he’s goofy and prances around the rally stage like a minor-league baseball mascot who has just discovered dexedrine; these are the hazards of nominating a public school teacher to high office. I don’t care that he struggles to load his shotgun or can’t seem to use football terminology correctly; if you expect a politician’s down-home persona to be backed up with real dirt-under-the-nails stuff, well, isn’t that sort of on you? The fact that he tried to get out of a DUI by pretending to be deaf makes me like him more. Nor do I actually care all that much about the “stolen valor” business; a veteran, particularly a veteran-turned-politico, fluffing up the old service record is hardly unheard of. (Refer back to the down-home persona clause.) All that stuff makes him annoying on the TV, but not much more so than any other would-be American overlord.

No, it’s the China stuff that is weird.

Walz has visited China many times—and there is no law against that. He speaks “fluent Mandarin”—no law against that, either. He fibbed about being in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square—well, that may be tasteless, but, again, not much for the prosecutors here. Getting married on Tiananmen Square’s anniversary? Ditto.

At some point, though, you wonder. The Daily Mail, that publication of consummate professionalism, dug up and interviewed Walz’s long-lost lover from his 1989 stint as a teacher in China. She happens to have been the daughter of a Chinese Communist Party labor leader. Does that mean anything? Not necessarily. There are many officials in the CCP, and some of them have daughters. Not everything has to be a communist police-state plot of honeypots and rubber hoses. But isn’t it worth asking the question?

How about the fact that, per the New York Post and a congressional committee, Walz was flagged by personnel in the Department of Homeland Security for his activities in China? Does that mean anything? Not necessarily. Your humble correspondent has, at various points, been on the official list for the special boarding pass and the impromptu airport massage treatments that go with it; he has yet to mount a serious challenge to American security. But, were your h.c. running for public office, it would not be remiss for the press to poke around and figure out whether something was going on there. 

Donald Trump underwent years of scrutiny over more tenuous and fanciful connections to Russia. Yet the mainstream press has all but ignored the Walz-China sideshow. (As of writing, the New York Times and Washington Post have published no reporting on the Mail’s interview with Walz’s erstwhile squeeze.) This doesn’t seem terribly healthy, with less than a week left to decide whether this man will be (dear old hackneyed cliche) a heartbeat from the presidency. It is a little redolent of the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was also spearheaded by the Post and the Mail.

We have written elsewhere that democracy is on the ballot, although not in the way you’d expect. One side represents the continued progress of technocratic rule and the corollary reduction of politics’ importance—another step down the slope away from republican rule—with the aid of a captive press. The other represents an effort to preserve and (aspirationally, anyway) to strengthen political control over American public life. I am not in any way persuaded that Walz is a Manchurian candidate or even a particularly compromised character; there are, however, unusual things reported about him that warrant an accounting. As things stand, Walz is what is called technically an unlimited liability. All could very well be in order, but do you feel as if you really know? Don’t you feel like you’re owed that information before you have to throw the lever?

That’s the nut. If you think democratic government in the conventional sense of the phrase is important, which team is more aligned: the fellows in red, who are thwarted by opposition officials and legislators at every turn, who are constantly scrutinized by an adversarial press, whose first run at an administration was so leaky that the media reported personnel and policy changes before the decisions were disseminated internally? Or the fellows in blue, who have been running the government around the president for some time, and whose quirks of biography have been passed over in near silence?