Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) is a lot of things, but he is not a lawyer. That’s why it was a special challenge when he became, as governor, the leader of the Minnesota Pardon Board, which also includes the attorney general and the chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, both of whom are lawyers.
That board was tasked with holding and deciding hearings in which petitioners for clemency would make their cases personally. The hearings were heart-wrenching, as petitioners poured out their stories and sometimes the victims of their crimes would describe their pain.
As a scholar of clemency at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, I went to Walz’s first hearing and watched with great interest.
I saw him as humble, human and emotionally engaged in the stories that came before him — those of both the petitioners and the victims of crime who testified. He nodded a lot as he listened, and sometimes he seemed on the verge of tears himself.
In a long-form article for the New York Times, Dan Barry quoted the governor describing his approach as, “You just try to do the best you can.”
It was not a lawyerly method, perhaps, but it exemplified a certain kind of leadership. Not surprisingly, it is the kind of leadership we see in the best coaches and teachers, which is precisely what Tim Walz was for years before entering politics.
The experience of those hearings seemed to hit Walz hard, as the Barry article reflected. But in his role as governor, that led to action: Walz promoted and then signed legislation that both made clemency more broadly available and created new support for victims of crime who may be dragged into the process. His heart led him to action, which is the most we can hope for in our elected leaders.
The pardon board experience was not an anomaly. The Coach Walz persona came out in force when he led the state through the COVID pandemic. While still a little self-deprecating — he had to admit at one meeting that he was handicapped because his dog ate his glasses — he held daily news conferences at the height of the pandemic complete with charts and graphs.
As he leaned over those charts and described what they meant, it was easy to imagine him diagramming plays for 17-year-old kids back at Mankato West High School in Blue Earth County. Coaches just have a certain look, an intensity; and it fits in that moment.
Right now, of course, Walz is being considered by Kamala Harris as a potential running mate. Other leading candidates include an astronaut, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), and the Georgetown Law-educated governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro (D).
The contrast is striking, but there are ways that Walz adds something the others cannot.
While Kelly was making his first trip to space in 2001 and Shapiro was working on Capitol Hill and studying law in D.C., Walz was teaching geography, coaching football and serving as the faculty adviser to the gay-straight alliance at Mankato West while spending weekends serving in the National Guard, where he had enlisted at age 17.
I’m sure there is a lot to learn from traveling to the International Space Station, but for many Americans, we can relate much more directly to Coach Walz.
We knew that guy, after all. He was the one who told us things were going to be ok after a loss, paid attention to the kids who were bullied, wore a military uniform without commissioned officer stripes, broke up a fight in the hallway and then cared enough to find out what that fight was about.
Too rarely do we honor that kind of hero, or appreciate their skills. Perhaps this is the time to do so.
Mark Osler is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
