Page 24 of 107 Days
I hadn’t met Tim’s family. From the vetting file, I knew that his wife, Gwen, had been a teacher for two decades, and that she and Tim had met when their underfunded public school in Nebraska had to install a flimsy partition dividing one classroom into two.
She taught on one side, Tim on the other.
I also knew that she’d championed criminal justice reform and stressed the role of educational opportunity in diverting youth from crime.
I knew we’d be closely aligned on these issues.
While she was known as an important adviser to her husband, she hadn’t taken a high-profile public role as Minnesota’s First Lady. I wondered how she’d manage the glare of the next ninety-one days.
It didn’t take long to find out. Gwen got right in there and proved to be a force.
As wife of a two-term governor and a guy who’d held congressional leadership positions, she was no neophyte on the trail, exuding warmth, heart, and soul.
A campaign like ours is something you do as two couples, two families, two partnerships, combining to form a third.
It forges intimacy and brings you close.
I adore Gwen.
Our first encounter was in the locker room of the Temple University gym, appropriate enough for Coach Walz.
It was my idea for the campaign to lean into Tim’s brand as coach, a role that conveys both strength and caring.
Tim was a relative unknown nationally, but there was so much about him that would be familiar to people’s everyday relationships and experiences.
Not many people have met an astronaut, and they might not love politicians, but most people can relate to a high school coach.
And with early voting starting in forty-five days, that immediate connection was important.
Knowing that, I’d asked the team to print up COACH signs that people could hold up at rallies.
Their kids, Hope and Gus, understandably seemed a little shell-shocked by the sudden change in their young lives.
Doug and I understood what they were going through.
Our kids had been there four years before.
I sent the staff away. We wanted to have a moment where we were just two families getting acquainted.
I was concerned for the kids and wanted them to know this was going to be okay and that we cared about them as people, not just props to walk onstage with.
We pulled chairs into a circle and chatted, getting to know one another a little, before it was time to go.
As we stood, Tim gathered us in a huddle, like we were his team in the locker room about to run onto the field. We put our hands in the circle and raised them with a cheer.
Ten thousand people had gathered to hear from us. The roar that met us when we walked out onstage was so deafening we could barely hear ourselves. Tim, unused to crowds of that size, looked astonished.
My first job that night was to introduce Tim Walz to the country.
This was not hard: the man has a biography that could provide scripts for several Hallmark movies.
I led with how he’d coached a perennially losing high school football team—they hadn’t scored a single touchdown in the first six weeks of the season before he became coach—to winning the state championship.
I went on to tell the story of how a student who wanted to start the first gay-straight alliance at the school had gone to this storied football coach to ask for his support.
Walz immediately agreed to become the group’s faculty adviser.
Tim said he thought it would send a message of inclusion if the adviser was a football coach, a soldier, straight, and married.
Waiting in the wings with Doug, Gwen was visibly nervous. When it came time for them to join us, Doug said, “Follow me!” and swept her out onto the stage.
As the four of us stood for applause, Tim grabbed Doug, rather than Gwen, for the big hug. (Cole and Tony later joked that Doug had never hugged them as passionately as he hugged Tim that night.)
When Tim clasped my hand to thrust it high in an enthusiastic victory gesture, he was so tall that the entire front of my jacket rose up.
It felt like I was dangling from a jungle gym while wearing a suit.
Not the best look. I made a mental note to tell him: From now on, when we do that, you gotta bend your elbow.
We rode the high of the crowd that night. It was a room full of joy. The campaign was fresh, alive, vibrating with energy. It seemed like anything was possible.