Gwen Walz made her debut as a solo campaigner for her husband, Tim Walz, and his running mate, Kamala Harris, on Friday, with a pointed attack on his Republican rival JD Vance.
Walz, the first lady of Minnesota and a former English teacher, took aim at Vance for his latest attack on childless women, this time when it was revealed that he had slammed a teachers’ union leader for not having a “single child.”
The attack on Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had been made by Vance at a Christian forum in 2021, with the audio unearthed this week by the left-leaning Heartland Signal. “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child,” Vance said in 2021. “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.” Weingarten herself called the comments “nonsensical” and pointed out that she considers herself a mother by marriage to her wife’s two biological children.
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But on Friday, Walz used that as crowd-pleasing material as she addressed an Educators for Harris-Walz event in Manassas, Virginia—and also used it to reference her and her husband’s struggles with infertility, which had caused him to trip up on the form of fertility treatment they used.
“For a long time Tim and I were teachers who struggled with infertility and we were only able to start a family because of fertility treatment,” she said, according to footage from NBC News. “So this is really personal for me, and I think it is for millions of Americans.
“So let me use my teacher voice,” she added to cheers. “English teachers, you know what these babies are for,” she said as she put on reading glasses. “Mr. Vance, how about you mind your own business?”
Asked for comment by The Daily Beast, Vance spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk responded: “There are a lot of great teachers across the country, and JD’s criticism of Randi Weingarten’s actions is not about them. It’s essential that our schools focus on teaching reading, writing, math, and the basics, and get out of the business of forcing anti-American propaganda into the curriculum.”
During her appearance Friday, Gwen Walz did not mention that she had had to correct the record over the couple’s fertility journey after her husband repeatedly said they used IVF—which is controversial in pro-life circles and has been effectively driven out of use in Alabama in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade—when they used a less contentious form of treatment, IUI (Intra-Uterine Injection).
Her more than 20-minute speech suggests that the campaign wants to see her hit more solo events and tell her and her husband’s story, majoring on their careers as teachers, as well as hitting at Vance. It was her husband’s description of Vance as “weird” that played a key part in putting him on the ticket with Vice President Kamala Harris.
The presence of Walz on the campaign trail solo adds a new dimension to the vice-presidential race and presents a contrast to Vance’s wife Usha, who has not been seen with him since the Republican National Convention and whose contribution to supporting him in public after that has been a single Fox News interview in which she defended his “childless cat ladies” insult. The Daily Beast revealed that Vance told friends his wife was voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
