Call him Coach: Tim Walz, governor and congressman, chooses a folksier intro to voters

Call him Coach.

Never mind that Tim Walz has been governor of Minnesota for the past five years and a congressman for a dozen years before that. As he seeks a promotion to vice president, he chose a folksier introduction Wednesday to Americans who had no idea who he was until Kamala Harris picked him as her running mate two weeks ago.

Not a pol, not at heart. Instead, a husband and father, a deer hunter and a car guy, a social studies teacher and a basketball coach from the Gopher State who helped turn his high-school team from losers to state champions.

"I haven't given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks, so let me finish with this," Walz declared to cheers as he accepted the vice-presidential nomination on the third night of the Democratic National Convention. "It's the fourth quarter. We're down a field goal, but we're on offense and we've got the ball."

With that, he said, Democrats could "block and tackle" down the field for the next 76 days of the campaign and "turn the page on Donald Trump."

It was hard to miss the intended message about who he was: He was introduced on stage by 15 guys, now young men, whom he had coached on the Mankato West High School football team. Some of them sported faded red football jerseys from those days, now straining at the seams.

The crowd in the United Center waved a sea of "Coach Walz" placards.

An opportunity to make a first impression

Timothy James Walz, the most obscure candidate picked for a major-party ticket since Sarah Palin, had the rare opportunity in his speech on the third night of the Democratic National Convention to make a first impression.

The opportunity ? and the risk.

The risk because the race is now on between Democrats who want to define Walz as a happy warrior and good-neighbor Midwesterner, and Republicans who are casting him as a leftist ideologue who can't be trusted to tell the truth.

But he came across as direct, unpretentious, blunt and funny. His speech lacked the sure-footed confidence and perfect cadence of Tuesday's barnburners from former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama that rocked the hall.

Instead, Walz, 60 and balding, projected an affable but determined, no-hogwash persona.

"You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don't come from some consultant; they come from his closet," Barack Obama had previewed. "And they've been through some stuff."

When Walz's speech was over and his family came on stage, his 17-year-old son, Gus, was grinning, tears in his eyes. "That's my Dad," he announced to the cheering crowd.

Veeps don't matter, except when they do

Vice-presidential candidates rarely affect the outcome of presidential elections, which typically turn on the top of the ticket. The last one who clearly did was six decades ago, when Sen. Lyndon Johnson delivered his home state of Texas for John F. Kennedy, clinching the Democrats' narrow victory in 1960.

But running mates can create troublesome distractions, as Donald Trump has discovered with his choice at last month's Republican convention of JD Vance.

The Ohio senator is still explaining controversial past statements, including his 2021 complaint that the country was being run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies," mentioning Harris by name.

So far, though, Harris, seems to be benefitting from an easy chemistry with Walz, whose exuberance on stage reinforces her image of an energetic new generation taking charge.

"Most people will vote based upon the presidential candidates, but I think Gov. Walz may matter more than many VP candidates," said Joel Goldstein of St. Louis University, who has studied the role of vice presidents. Their complementary backgrounds ? the prosecutor from San Francisco and the public-school teacher reared in rural Nebraska ? could broaden the ticket's appeal.

He fulfilled one traditional role of vice presidents: Attacking the other ticket.

He said Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, would pursue a far-right agenda, "an agenda that serves nobody except the richest and the most extreme among us." They would ban abortion nationwide and repeal the Affordable Care Act, he said.

"It is weird?" he asked, a word he had coined about Trump. "Absolutely. But it's also wrong, and it's dangerous."

With Kamala Harris, "we've got something better to offer the American people."

She accepts the presidential nomination at the convention's climax Thursday night.

Hero teacher or blatant liar?

A few hours before he spoke, a Democratic super-PAC called Priorities USA Action and the American Federation of Teachers announced a "six-figure" buy for a Mr. Chips-style ad that featured a former student of "Mr. Walz" recalling her teacher's efforts to make the classroom comfortable for kids of all political stripes.

At almost the same moment, the Trump-Vance campaign released an open letter signed by 50 Republican members of Congress who are military veterans accusing Walz of "blatant misrepresentations" about his 24 years of service in the National Guard.

At issue is Walz saying he had left the National Guard as a "retired command sergeant major;" while he had achieved that rank, he retired one step lower. The letter criticized him for saying in 2018 that he had carried weapons "in war" when he hadn't been deployed in combat, only in support operations.

The letter also said Walz had "turned your back on your troops," a reference to his decision to retire as he began his first campaign for Congress and as speculation swirled that his unit was going to be deployed to Iraq.

Walz didn't respond directly to them, but he did describe his pride in enlisting as soon as he turned 17. A video before he spoke showed interviews with two men with whom he served, praising his leadership.

Before he was picked by Harris, 9 of 10 Americans in an ABC/Ipsos poll said they didn't know enough about him to have an opinion. In a new AP/NORC poll, 36% had a favorable impression of him, 25% an unfavorable one.

Which still leaves 1 in 4 Americans up for grabs.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Coach' Tim Walz spins a folksy intro speech as running mate at DNC