Would-be ‘Second Lady’ Gwen Walz in spotlight amid fertility row

CHICAGO – Mrs Gwen Walz, the wife of Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, was in the spotlight at the party’s convention on Aug 21 just as a row over the couple’s fertility treatment erupted.

The 58-year-old teacher – who introduced Ms Kamala Harris’ running mate in a video ahead of his star turn in Chicago – boasts a similar folksy Midwestern style to that of her husband.

Even more so than the Minnesota governor, Mrs Walz remains something of an unknown quantity with voters, but Democrats hope the couple will help Ms Harris’ campaign reach out to Middle America.

She got a taste of stardom at the convention on Aug 20 night, when former president Barack Obama hailed Mr Walz’s homely flannel shirts and said they “come from his closet, and they have been through some stuff”.

The huge jumbotron screen in the Chicago arena then panned to Mrs Walz clapping and nodding at Mr Obama’s comments and waving her hands in the air.

“It’s so true, @BarackObama,” she posted on Aug 21 on social media platform X, along with a picture of her husband with a chequered black-and-red shirt. “Tim loves his flannels.”

But the woman who could become the next “US Second Lady” gets far more personal in her video for the convention.

She describes meeting Mr Walz when they were both teaching at a high school in Nebraska – where students have described them as being “a little like” then President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary.

“We shared a classroom with a divider right down the middle,” she said in the video. “His classroom was a lot louder than mine but I could hear how engaged his students were.”

Her narration also mentions their struggle to have children.

“Fertility treatments made it possible. There’s a reason our daughter is called Hope,” she said.

Mr Walz has also frequently alluded to the issue on the campaign trail, using it to warn that Republicans want to limit access to abortion and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF).

But Republicans cried foul this week when Mrs Walz revealed in a pre-convention interview with Glamour magazine that the couple had used a different fertility treatment.

Instead of IVF – which combines an egg with sperm in a laboratory – they used intrauterine insemination, in which sperm is placed directly into the uterus, sometimes in combination with the use of hormones.

Mr Walz’s Republican rival for the vice-presidency, Senator J.D. Vance, accused him of having “lied about having a family via IVF”.

“Who lies about something like that?” Mr Vance said.

But Democrats will be counting that the couple’s stories will connect with voters in similar situations.

In another personal revelation timed for the convention, the Walzes told People magazine their “brilliant” 17-year-old son Gus has a learning disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and an anxiety disorder.

While she faces a test on the national stage, Mrs Walz has long been involved in politics at a local level.

While Mr Vance’s wife Usha is a political ingenue, Mrs Walz has been advising her husband for nearly two decades in Minnesota politics.

During that time, she emerged as a “cool-headed” force in contrast to her live-wire husband, with some colleagues wondering if she would one day run for office herself, The New York Times reported.

“When you get Tim, you get Gwen,” Mr John Klaber, who met the couple in 1996 when they all worked at a school in Minnesota, told the newspaper.

The folksiness, the political ambition and the hopes for 2024 were all on show this week.

Mrs Walz said Democrats could “win this thing” as she addressed a side event in Chicago.

“When Tim ran for Congress in 2006, the last thing he had been elected to was the homecoming king,” she said. “We have never lost a political race since.” AFP