(AFP) – Gwen Walz, the wife of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, is in the spotlight at the party’s convention on Wednesday just as a row over the couple’s fertility treatment erupts. The 58-year-old teacher — who introduced Kamala Harris’s running mate in a video ahead of his star turn in Chicago — boasts a similar folksy Midwestern style to that of her husband.
Even more so than the Minnesota governor, Gwen Walz remains something of an unknown quantity with voters, but Democrats hope the couple will help Harris’s campaign reach out to Middle America. She got a taste of stardom at the convention on Tuesday night, when former president Barack Obama hailed Tim Walz’s homely flannel shirts and said they “come from his closet, and they have been through some stuff.” The huge jumbotron screen in the Chicago arena then panned to Gwen Walz, clapping and nodding at Obama’s comments and waving her hands in the air.
“It’s so true, @BarackObama,” she posted Wednesday on X, along with a picture of her husband with a checkered black and red shirt. “Tim loves his flannels.” But the woman who could become the next US Second Lady gets far more personal in her video for the convention. She describes meeting Tim Walz when they were both teaching at a high school in Nebraska — where students have described them as being “a little like” then-president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary.
“We shared a classroom with a divider right down the middle,” she says in the video. “His classroom was a lot louder than mine, but I could hear how engaged his students were.” Her narration also mentions their struggle to have children. “Fertility treatments made it possible. There’s a reason our daughter is called Hope,” she says. Tim Walz has also frequently alluded to the issue on the campaign trail, using it to warn that Republicans want to limit access to abortion and in vitro fertilization (IVF).
But Republicans cried foul this week when Gwen Walz revealed in a pre-convention interview with Glamour magazine that the couple had used a different fertility treatment. Instead of IVF — which combines an egg with sperm in a lab — they used Intrauterine Insemination, in which sperm is placed directly into the uterus, sometimes in combination with the use of hormones. Walz’s Republican rival for the vice presidency, J.D. Vance, accused him of having “lied about having a family via IVF. Who lies about something like that?”
But Democrats will be counting that the couple’s stories connect with voters in similar situations. In another personal revelation timed for the convention, the Walzes told People magazine their “brilliant” 17-year-old son Gus has a learning disorder, ADHD, and an anxiety disorder. While she faces a test on the national stage, Gwen Walz has long been involved in politics at a local level.
While Vance’s wife Usha is a political ingenue, Gwen has been advising her husband for nearly two decades in Minnesota politics. During that time, she emerged as a “coolheaded” force in contrast to her livewire husband, with some colleagues wondering if she would one day run for office herself, The New York Times reported. “When you get Tim, you get Gwen,” John Klaber, who met the couple in 1996 when they all worked at a school in Minnesota, told the newspaper. The folksiness, the political ambition, and the hopes for 2024 were all on show this week.
Gwen Walz said Democrats could “win this thing” as she addressed a side event in Chicago. “When Tim ran for Congress in 2006, the last thing he had been elected to was the homecoming king,” she said. “We have never lost a political race since.”
– Danny KEMP
© 2024 AFP
