780 MINUTES WITH ...Tim Walz

How the vice-presidential candidate cuts through the miasma of Democratic panic.

- KERRY HOWLEY

SMALL TALK is physical. When well executed, it is a collection of gentle gestures well matched to the speaker, a unity of mind and body that never rises to the level of consciousness. When Tim Walz listens, he waits with his brows knit (and it helps, here, to have massive, bushy brows) and his hands clasped, thumbs touching. When he laughs, he throws his head backward and his mouth opens wide (and it helps, here, to have an unusually large mouth), and when his head snaps forward, he has a retort ready. At a great distance from someone he is meeting, he will throw both hands in the air, as if overcome with the joy of seeing a functionary from a minor city. At a middle distance, he will deploy two finger guns; at a shorter distance, one. He is given to go for a handshake, which, when appropriate, he may pull into a hug, and which, when appropriate, he may punctuate with a slap on the back. One might say he knows what he is doing, but of course, all the effect is in the fact that he does not.

There is no obvious connection between an ability to commune with strangers and an ability to govern; one might even be inclined to posit the opposite, in that an easy fluidity masks false intention. The fact remains that Walz is so natural with people that every encounter comes across, through no fault of his own, as trolling his opponent, a man who cannot so much as order a doughnut or answer a question (“What makes you smile?”) without expressing a mysteriously motivated sense of resentment (“I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media”).