RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s a reason nobody expected far-left Kamala Harris to pick a far-left governor from a deep blue state as her running mate. It’s never worked.

In the wake of Jimmy Carter’s crushing defeat in 1980 and repeated Democratic losses thereafter, the party decided that to win presidential elections they had to at least appear as moderates.

Bill Clinton won by labeling himself a “new Democrat” and picked Al Gore, then a fellow moderate Southerner. Gore in turn tapped Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Barack Obama tried to position himself to the right of John McCain and ran with Scranton Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton picked Virginia moderate Sen. Tim Kaine to balance the ideological scales. Biden ran as a sensible centrist with a talent for working both sides of the aisle (and picked Harris more as an insurance policy against impeachment than anything else).

Which is why pundits across the board expected Harris – in what amounts to the first important decision she has made as presidential candidate — to pick a more mainstream governor with cross-party appeal from a swing state like Arizona or Pennsylvania.

But the radicalized, hopeless woke Democratic party couldn’t bring itself to OK anyone like that. So instead, Harris decided to “balance” the ticket with another leftist.

As Axios reported today: “Many Republicans expressed surprise and relief at the choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, readying renewed ‘radical’ liberal attacks.”

No matter, it goes on, because “Walz has backing from many influential Democratic voices, including the progressive wing of the party which has at times turned on President Biden, especially over his handling of the war in Gaza.”

Just how far left is Walz? On a recent fundraising call, he said “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Bernie Sanders enthusiastically endorsed him.

We won’t bother to detail Walz’s tattered record as governor here — his mishandling of the George Floyd riots, the COVID lockdowns, his reckless tax-and-spend policies, support for unlimited abortions, the fact that his state was involved in one of the biggest COVID relief fraud schemes, or that he recently approved a budget that hiked spending 38% and taxes by $10 billion.

Nor will we dwell on his multitude of failures as governor – overseeing a rampant increase in crime, high energy prices, tumbling student test scores, a weak economy, and the resulting exodus of people from the state — which Powerline’s John Hinderacker, who lives in Minnesota, does to devastating effect.

We will let others detail all that.

What we will say is this:

Either Democrats are supremely confident that they can beat Donald Trump and see this as their golden opportunity to import Venezuelan-style socialism into the U.S., or the party has completely lost touch with reality.

We just hope voters haven’t lost touch with reality. Because the best thing to happen to this country would be for them to hand the radical team of Harris-Waltz a Jimmy Carter-scale defeat this November. Maybe that will smack some sense into the Democratic party.