The Fumble

Maybe more football is needed. As Americans across the country shout “Sack him!” or “Go for it,” one odd fellow in Minnesota will be shouting, “run the pick-six.” Whatever that means.

This is the tall tale of one Tim Walz, a failed VP candidate and now a failed Minnesota governor. Walz’s costly catastrophe of tenure seems to be winding down: this week, as he announced that he wouldn’t be seeking a third term, apparently marking the end of a political career that electrified Democrats less than 18 months ago. Running for vice president, the plainspoken Walz, appealingly Midwestern, was the antidote for the cackling California weirdness of the wobbly presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.

Democrats told one another that Mr. Walz was that most elusive figure in their party: a guy you might find at the bar at Applebee’s. He had even been defensive coordinator for a high-school football team that won the state championship. He was the Great Normal Hope.

One foot ahead of Mamdani.

Non-Democrats have figured out, discovers Kyle Smith in the WSJ, that there really was something weird about this guy. Really? Would an aw-shucks Midwesterner, they wondered, be such “a superfan of China that he learns to speak Mandarin, visits a dozen or so times, and praises communism as a system where everyone is the same and everyone shares”?

Sports is the lingua franca of heterosexual American men, every successful American politician has discovered. Yet Democrats seem to flounder with this, too. Days before the election, explains Mr. Smith, Walz did what normal men don’t need to do. He performed masculinity as though auditioning for a part.

(Walz) did this by live-streaming himself playing video game football with the far-left and hence far-from-normal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He noted nonsensically on X, “AOC can run a mean pick 6—and I can call an audible on a play.” But you don’t run a pick-six. You run a zone blitz or a cover 2, but you can’t run a pick-six, which is shorthand for a defender intercepting a football (the pick) and running it all the way back for a touchdown (the 6). A pick-six is a miracle you pray for, not something you call.

They can’t even fake their basic sports chat. Take Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, for example. During Mr. Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, the Red Sox were on their way to winning their first World Series in 86 years. This was via the efforts of heroes David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. Mr. Kerry said his favorite player was “Manny Ortez.”

Barack Obama, the Hawaiian who keeps saying he’s from Chicago, was under the impression that the Chicago White Sox played at “Cominskey Field.” As every even partly normal Chicagoan and baseball fan knows, it was Comiskey Park.

Kyle Smith thinks perhaps the weirdest of all sports-related ideas, yet one seemingly cherished by nearly all Democratic elected officials, is that men who say they are transgender should be allowed to demolish women on the field of play.

“If Democrats want to know how to re-establish themselves as something resembling a normal party, they should ignore shrieking activists and pay more attention to sports.”