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From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal.

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Well, that was quite a couple of weeks. We jump off

the new cycle for a short vacation and the world erupts. President Joe Biden announces he

standing down. The Democrats immediately install Carmel Harris in his place by acclamation. Tensions

in the Middle East escalate to the point of near outright war. The economy trembles and the

stock market shudders. All that and an Olympic opening ceremony of woke weirdness that only the French could manage. We'll have plenty of time in the next few weeks to talk about all of this, well, maybe not the woke Olympics, but for now I'm going to focus on the big news of this week until maybe something else blows up. And that is Kamala Harris's selection of her running mate for the presidential election. By now, of course, you'll all know it's Tim Walls, the governor of Minnesota. Now, depending on whom you listen to, this selection is either a work of genius, certain to clinch the race to the Democrats, or a calamitous era that will send Donald Trump back to the White House. Now, vice presidential picks are rarely that important, but this year, given the

unusual state of politics, who knows? Democrats and their media friends have already

anointed Waltz as the perfect candidate, the regular guy, former soldier, high school teacher

and football coach from the glorious heart of the country in the upper Midwest. He's mac and cheese

and a trip to the hardware store, as a

fawning Democrat put it on MSNBC. Assault of the Earth American right out of a normal Rockwell

painting. Republicans say, whoa, hold on. This is the governor who let Minnesota burn for three

days during the riots that followed the George Floyd killing in 2020 because he didn't want

to bring in the National Guard and he sympathized with the riot's objectives. And his record on everything from taxes to cultural issues like

transgender and abortion matters, they're right out of the far left playbook. So what is

he really? And what does his selection rather than that of Josh Shapiro, who had been seen

as the frontrunner, the very popular governor of an actual

swing state, but who also happens to be Jewish, what does all that say about Kamala Harris'

...