RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, AUGUST 11, 2024. It’s cooler up here on the northwest shore of the most easterly North American Great Lake.

In some similar spirit the final strand of the new Democratic party ticket for the 2024 US election is now in place. Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (pronounced “Walls”) as her vice-presidential running mate. As reported in the Los Angeles Times : “The Democratic presidential ticket is settled.”

At the same time, the LA Times also wonders whether Tim Walz is “ a game changer?”

And it further reports : “Probably not, say Christopher J. Devine, an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton, and Kyle C. Kopko, an adjunct professor at Elizabethtown College … ‘We’ve spent more than a decade studying candidates for vice president, and our research shows that voters’ opinions of running mates do not have much direct effect on presidential voting.’”

(1) Arms, the man, and “another person’s neighborliness”

Perhaps because they don’t read political scientists, Trump Republicans have nonetheless been hard at work attacking the newly appointed Governor Walz.

To denigrate his 24-years of service with the National Guard, they claim he retired from his unit just before it was sent to seriously dangerous active service in Iraq. (Tim Walz had earlier been “sent to Italy during Operation Enduring Freedom to provide support to the U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan.”)

In response fellow US armed- service veteran Pete Buttigieg, to take just one example, has nicely observed that : “Come to think of it, denigrating the worth of a soldier’s service based on whether he deployed to a war zone is … kind of like denigrating the worth of a woman’s citizenship based on whether she happens to have children.”

Meanwhile the Republican National Committee Research group has unearthed what it regards as one clear mark of Tim Walz’s unsuitability as US vice president. It has pointed to his historical observation that : “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

In response here former Clinton administration labor secretary Robert Reich has raised Democratic President Harry Truman’s observation of 1952 :

“Socialism is a scare word they’ve hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance, and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.”

(2) “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”

Whatever difference Governor Walz may or may not make as vice-presidential candidate in the November 5, 2024 vote, he has already proved a campaigner with real oratorical talent.

A nice example is this recent Tim Walz rally joke : “Make no mistake violent crime was up under Donald Trump. And that’s not even counting the crimes he committed” himself!

There has in any case already been some polling evidence that the Harris-Walz ticket is gaining ground in a campaign that had earlier almost seemed Donald Trump’s to lose. A recent Marquette national poll had Harris 50%, Trump 42%, (Robert F.) Kennedy 6%.

As of August 5 Nate Silver’s 538 forecast was reporting these numbers — Chance of winning: Harris 53%, Trump 46% ; Electoral votes (where 270 is the bare winning number) : Harris 282, Trump 255.

At the same time, as matters stand Donald Trump is still speaking for a substantial block of the electorate, who remain alienated or worse from the latest technological revolutions in the global economy. That may change by November 5, as (and if) Harris-Walz seems better able to address this alienation than increasingly weird Trump Republicans. But it hasn’t quite happened yet.

The Harris-Walz Democrats might take some advice from Robert Frost’s poem of the 1920s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening … The woods are lovely, dark and deep./But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.”

(3) Canada, Georgia’s Election Board, Forbes magazine, and Kamala Harris’s high notes

Meanwhile again, such Canadian provincial premiers as the Conservative Doug Ford in Ontario and the New Democrat Wab Kinew in Manitoba have expressed some happiness about Tim Walz’s selection as the new Democratic vice-presidential candidate.

Governor Walz and Premier Ford met in Toronto only a few months ago, to discuss “how to strengthen the economic ties between Ontario and Minnesota” which currently “do $7.6 billion in two-way trade.”

And then Marc E. Elias is worried about a new rule passed by “three members of Georgia’s Election Board.” It is meant “to undermine the certification of elections.”

Moreover, all this in Georgia is “part of a national strategy by the GOP,” which is “trying to put enough election deniers in polling places, in county offices and at the state level to subvert the [upcoming 2024] election.”

And then still again, according to corporate-friendly Forbes magazine, an “analysis of tax returns, financial disclosures, bond filings, credit reports, and internal records“ suggests that : “By refusing to give up his business, as other presidents have done when taking office, Trump profited $550 million from 2017 to 2020.”

Finally, the new Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has also already shown that she knows how to strike the high notes in her campaign rhetoric — in ways that effectively make crucial arguments.

As she told the vast crowd listening in Eau Claire, Wisconsin this past week :

“Let us be clear. Let us be clear. Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States [as Donald Trump has in fact done not all that long ago], should never again have a chance to stand behind the seal of the President of the United States.”