Now the Democrats — who had the N.B.A. and U.S. Olympics basketball coach Steve Kerr speak earlier in the week — were hyping their new recruit. “I’m glad we’ve got a championship-winning coach on our team,” said former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday. Senator Amy Klobuchar, from Mr. Walz’s state of Minnesota, quipped, “A former football coach knows how to level the playing field.” (“Expect to hear the word ‘coach’ a lot,” said NBC’s Hallie Jackson, the understatement of the night.)
Mr. Walz was not above a nudging football reference himself. Speaking of the conservative governing blueprint Project 2025, he said, “When someone takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”
Beyond that, in his feisty, upbeat style, Mr. Walz was reclaiming conservative-associated cultural ideas for progressives. He played up his Nebraska roots, walking on to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” but he cast rural life as being about community, tolerance and interdependence. He used his history as a gun owner as bona fides to call for gun regulation.
In a campaign that has often seemed like a battle of the sexes, this has been a bit of a “Free to Be … You and Me” convention, answering the language of he-men and childless cat ladies with the message that gender roles can be varied and nuanced. Tuesday night, Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, played the doting, smitten spouse, singing the praises of his successful wife while also mentioning his fantasy football team named after Nirvana.
White-haired and un-slick, speaking in Midwestern vowels as flat and long as a prairie, Mr. Walz reads as a dad, but one modeling an evolved kind of manhood and fatherhood. Think coaches are stoic and rigid? There was Mr. Walz swooningly holding his hand to his heart as the crowd cheered. Think boys don’t cry? There was Mr. Walz’s son, Gus, in the crowd, teary-eyed, pointing and shouting, “That’s my dad!”
This is still a presidential election between a Republican man and a Democratic woman; polls have consistently shown a gender gap. But Wednesday’s production cast the Democrats as the party of both football and Oprah, balancing the ticket with a little inspirational, male-weepie sports drama.
On TV, clear eyes and full hearts can’t lose. Can they win the Electoral College?
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