Tim Walz is apparently back at his borrowed house, Eastcliff, on River Road and Otis Avenue. Dayton Avenue was still closed for a block a couple of days after the election and the security staff on duty had yet to pack up and fold their klieg lights and break down their Checkpoint Charlie huts and move all the vehicles.

Come on, agents, time is money. Thank you, now move along. Walz is back in the capable hands of the Minnesota State Patrol. It was probably more thrilling to have been assigned a code name – maybe Flannel, or Air Cleaner – but governors don’t require the full force of the government’s redundant alphabet agencies.

Was Walz humbled by the experience? Was he perhaps even humiliated when gaffe after gaffe kept coming? Gaffes are what cheerleading news correspondents and friendly pundits call lies. He told some whoppers, right up to and including being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square Uprising in 1989. He was in Nebraska at the time. He didn’t seem to do his teaching profession any favors, first by boasting he sure as heck never sent a student to an Ivy League education and second by explaining upon every gaffe, “I’m just a knucklehead who gets his words mixed up,” or words to that effect. Cheerleaders also use misspeaking when they mean lying.

“People know who I am,” Walz said, as though that sweetened it every time he misspoke.

No, Walz, we didn’t know you at all. Being the trusting doofus Minnesotans that we are, we shrugged off that America’s Dad thing, and that cringing air-cleaner bit you had filmed for a campaign ad. Tim, you put the old air cleaner back in.

We didn’t know the depth of affection Walz has for China, evidenced by his claim that he had been to China dozens and dozens of times. Maybe it just seemed like it. The Harris people, getting out of breath from chasing these things down, said it was more like 15 times. Or maybe they thought dozens of trips to China would be considered unusual for America’s Dad.

It is none of our business I suppose, but we didn’t know Walz honeymooned in China and routinely took students to China in travel package deals. We didn’t know Walz’s daughter, Hope, then 19, according to a variety of sources including Newsweek, texted rioters protesting George Floyd’s death regarding Minnesota National Guard movements. How could she have known?

We didn’t know he claimed to have seen action in the War on Terror. He did not, nor did he retire from the National Guard as a command sergeant major, but actually a master sergeant.

We didn’t know Walz had a DUI in Nebraska in 1995. It happens, but people usually don’t pass it off as a result of a hearing loss from his military service.

And, most unfortunately, we didn’t know Walz was not terribly well thought of by his family in Nebraska, who, when found by the news, chose to stay mum.

There are 87 counties in Minnesota. Donald Trump, and JD Vance, won 78 of those counties. Harris won the metro and the Arrowhead and Clay and Olmsted counties.

In 2022, the state governor’s race map was virtually identical. Scott Jensen won 77 of the 87 counties. Walz won the metro along with Olmsted, Nicollet and Blue Earth counties.

Now that Walz has two years left in his term, will he continue to govern only nine or 10 counties? Will he accommodate the truth that people in 78 of the state’s 87 counties as well as many in the counties here in the metro have more on their plate than worrying about pronouns?

If you want to be the dad, Tim, tighten your belt and don’t leave this state in financial desperation.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic’’ podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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