What Walz means to progressives

Before U.S. vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago Wednesday night, an athlete he once coached introduced him. This wasn't one of the football players from Mankato high school where he taught. It was a basketball and track athlete from the middle school down the road.

- EDWARD KEENAN

Walz, he explained, was concerned that one of his high school students had accumulated lunch debt, and had offered to help pay it off. So Walz, a national guard soldier and high school teacher and football coach, took yet another job moonlighting as a middle school coach too. And he inspired those kids in ways they remember decades later.

It's a story that is almost too perfect in summing up Walz's appeal as a candidate for a progressive party running against the Trump-fired populist right wing.

He's a man so compelled to serve his neighbours that he took a third job to ensure a community kid had enough to eat (and a man of such humble means that he needed the extra income to help). He did it with a smile on his face. And then he turned that personal experience into political action when, as governor, he passed a measure offering free school breakfast and lunch to every student in Minnesota.

In his own speech, Walz said, "That's what this is all about: the responsibility we have to our kids, to each other, and to the future that we're building together."