Tim Walz, Bill Clinton to speak at Democratic convention’s third day
CHICAGO– Candidate for Vice President Tim Walz and former president Bill Clinton will be headlined on Wednesday, the third day of the Democratic National Convention, choreographed rollout of the party of a new candidate, Kamala Harris, and her message to voters.
In a delicate balancing act, Harris and the cavalcade of Democrats who have marched on her behalf all week are trying to harness the exuberance that has swept their party since President Joe Biden left office while simultaneously signaling to their supporters that the election will be a fierce and frustratingly close contest.
“The stakes are so high in this election,” Harris said Tuesday in Milwaukee, where she spoke at a professional basketball arena in battleground Wisconsin while the convention continued 90 miles away in Chicago. “And understand, this is not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are higher.”
And hours later in Chicago, Former President Barack Obama offered his own warning: “Make no mistake, it’s going to be a fight,” Obama said. Despite all the energy, memes and rallies that have marked the campaign since Harris became the nominee, Obama said, “This is still going to be a close race in a country that is deeply divided.”
Harris is working to forge a broad coalition in her bid to defeat the former Republican president Donald Trump this fall. She is calling on stars such as Obama and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama and other celebrities, officials from the far left to the center and even some Republicans to bolster her campaign.
And while Tuesday’s theme was “a bold vision for America’s future,” the disparate factions of Harris’s Evolving Coalition have shown above all that they are united by a deep desire to prevent a second Trump presidency.
Convention organizers called Wednesday’s theme “a fight for our freedoms,” a nod to the concept Harris has organized her campaign around. She has portrayed Trump as a threat to abortion rights and personal choice, but also to democracy itself.
Walz’s job on Wednesday, when he accepts the nomination, will be to introduce himself to Americans who had never heard of the Minnesota governor until Harris plucked him from relative obscurity to join her ticket. His goofy, folksy, Midwestern-dad aura has endeared him to Democrats and balanced Harris’ coastal background.
In the intense scrutiny that comes with a presidential campaign, Walz has repeatedly faced questions about embellishing his background. His wife, Gwen Walz, this week clarified that she has not undergone in vitro fertilization but has undergone other fertility treatments, after Republicans pointed out that her husband had spoken publicly on multiple occasions about his family’s reliance on IVF. JD Vancethe Republican vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, called a liar.
Republicans have also pointed to a Commentary 2018 in which Walz refers to weapons “I carried in the war” while discussing gun violence. Although he served in the National Guard for 24 years, Walz was not deployed to a war zone.
Clinton, meanwhile, is a veteran of the political convention speech — and notorious for his long spiel. He bored the audience with his keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention, when he was the young, little-known governor of Arkansas. It damaged his reputation, but he recovered, and when he spoke at a convention again four years later, it was to accept the Democratic nomination.