Why Tim Walz would be the perfect coach for Team Albo

Not since Kevin Kline played the doppelgänger of a US president in the 1993 movie Dave has a politician instantly become such a beloved figure as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz. Here in Australia, he also had the familiarity of a lookalike. “He looks like all of Australia’s last five prime ministers morphed into one,” someone joked on X.

Australian prime ministers work tirelessly to portray themselves as an Australian everyman, what with their footy-loving at weekends and Akubra hat-wearing in the bush. But whether donning his camouflage hunting cap or recalling his years as a high school football coach, Walz pulls off the American archetype with effortless authenticity. The governor of Minnesota has even turned daggy dad jokes into a political art form, a skill that eluded Scott Morrison.

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It is not just the folksy aesthetics and the Friday Night Lights backstory that is so compelling. His messaging sets Walz apart. With one word – “weird” – he captured the oddness of Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. In doing so, he reframed the election and catapulted himself to stardom. Had it not been for his interview on MSNBC’s must-watch talkshow Morning Joe, where he first dropped the W-word, he would not have ended up on the Democratic ticket.

Rather than portraying Trump as an existential threat to democracy, which had been Joe Biden’s line of attack, he consciously decided to use more homespun and less abstract language. “That kind of stuff is overwhelming for people,” he told Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “Weird” was a way of showing, as he put it, “the emperor’s wearing no clothes”. Suddenly, it became the Democratic watchword.

Tim Walz, the vice-presidential nominee, at the Democratic National Convention.Credit: Bloomberg

It is not just Walz. The central reason Kamala Harris has confounded her many critics is the clarity of her messaging. In her first speech as the de facto Democratic nominee, she spoke of how her career as a prosecutor had pitted her against perpetrators of all kinds. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.” Bullseye.

What makes her stump speeches sound so fresh is her redefinition of “freedom”, a nostrum traditionally associated with the American right. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, she used the word a dozen times, tying together her governing philosophy with the vocabulary of conservatism: “The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

This has become the overarching theme of her campaign, and it comes with the added bonus of a soundtrack from Beyoncé, whose song Freedom has become Harris’ anthem.

This freedom agenda is a reworking, of course, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. During his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR spoke of the “freedom from fear” and the “freedom from want”. And therein lies an irony. Roosevelt is Joe Biden’s ghostly presidential soulmate, the predecessor he has sought to emulate. Yet it is Harris who has brought the 32nd president’s credo to contemporary life. Its cleverness lies in being so all-encompassing. It weaves together the need to protect reproductive rights, the environment, voting rights and schoolchildren from mass shootings. It is not just a shopping list. There’s an interconnectedness that lands with voters and, importantly, a largely friendly media.

As we approach the next federal election, will this find an echo in Australia? After all, in the space of three weeks the Democrats have come up with the kind of clear messaging that the Albanese government has struggled to articulate in near on three years. Will Peter Dutton be tagged with a single buzzword? “Nasty” maybe, rather than “weird”. Is there scope for Walz-ing Matilda?

In posing these questions, I realise this country doesn’t go in for flowery rhetoric or arias of Australian exceptionalism. The preference is for prose rather than poetry. Budget night, not some Canberra facsimile of the State of the Union address, is the set-piece parliamentary event of the calendar. Bean counting rather than lyricism.

For all that, Australian politicians almost appear to have given up on scripting a grand national narrative. Storytelling has given way to sloganeering. Small-target campaigning has become the enemy of big-picture thinking.

Nor does easing cost-of-living pressures, the main priority of the Albanese government, lend itself to grandiloquence. But Walz reminds us that political storytelling need not be highfalutin. His mantra in Minnesota has been to make his state the best place to raise a family, a simple statement that brings under the same rubric education, global warming, healthcare, reproductive rights, housing, policing and even national defence.

For an Albanese government still struggling to find its voice, Walz is the ideal coach.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.