Walz’s decades-old drink driving case draws new attention after his pick as Harris’ running mate

LOS ANGELES - On the night of Sept 23, 1995, a 31-year-old Tim Walz was pulled over by a Nebraska state trooper for driving a silver Mazda at more than 150 kmh in a 90 kmh zone.

The officer smelled alcohol, and after Mr Walz failed a field sobriety test and a preliminary breath test, he was arrested and initially charged with speeding and driving while intoxicated.

At the time, Mr Walz was living in Alliance, Nebraska, coaching football, teaching at Alliance High School and serving in the Nebraska Army National Guard.

His political career would not begin for more than a decade. He ultimately agreed to resolve the issue in court by pleading to a reduced charge of reckless driving, a misdemeanour, and paying a US$200 (S$260) fine.

But the issue was not resolved in the court of public opinion, where it has resurfaced periodically throughout the Minnesota Governor’s career and, now that he has been

selected by Vice-President Kamala Harris

as her running mate, is bubbling up once again.

In the past few days, critics of Mr Walz have peppered social media with posts about the arrest, along with his mugshot and grainy scans of the arresting officer’s affidavit, labelling the politician a criminal who is unfit to serve.

Defenders of the governor have dismissed the offence as not only minor, but very old – something from nearly three decades ago now.

They have also pointed out that Mr George W. Bush had a quarter-century-old drink driving arrest on his record when he ran successfully for president in 2000, and that Representative Tom Emmer, who serves as the majority whip, was twice arrested on suspicions of driving drunk as a young man.

Still, part of the anecdote’s staying power might rest in the way Mr Walz’s story has changed over time.

The arrest first came up in 2006, during his initial run for Congress, when a Republican political researcher noted it on his blog, Minnesota Democrats Exposed.

At the time, Mr Walz’s campaign blamed the hearing loss that Mr Walz had from serving in a field artillery unit in the National Guard, saying that his partial deafness led to a miscommunication with the state trooper who pulled him over. In 2005, he had surgery to mitigate the hearing issue.

“He couldn’t understand what the officer was saying to him,” Mr Walz’s campaign manager at the time, Ms Kerry Greeley, told a reporter for The Rochester Post Bulletin, noting that deaf people can have balance issues and claiming that Mr Walz was not drunk at the time.

But during his first run for governor in 2018, he told The Minneapolis Star Tribune a different story, acknowledging the sobriety issue and explaining he’d been watching college football on that 1995 evening.

“You have obligations,” his wife, Mrs Gwen Walz, recounted telling him at the time. “You can’t make dumb choices.”

Mr Walz has said he no longer drinks alcohol, and instead prefers Diet Mountain Dew – the same drink that, curiously enough, is favoured by the Republican candidate for vice-president, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio.

The arrest made headlines again in 2022, late in Mr Walz’s bid for a second term as governor, when a digital news outlet in Minnesota procured a transcript of his plea hearing from March 1996.

The court record revealed that the governor had a blood alcohol level of 0.128, well over Nebraska’s legal limit of 0.1 at the time.

The latest round of stories about Mr Walz’s offence, which began appearing in volume once his name started circulating as a potential vice-presidential nominee, have – at least so far – failed to pry up any more revealing details about that long-ago Saturday night on Route 385 outside Alliance.

A copy of the hearing transcript reviewed by The New York Times does provide a bit more colour about the event and its aftermath, however.

In court, defence lawyer Russell Horford stated that Mr Walz said that when the state trooper began to follow him, he “thought somebody was chasing him” and accelerated, “fearing that somebody was after him”.

“The faster he went, the faster the state patrol officer went,” Mr Horford said.

“He felt terrible about this,” Mr Horford added, noting that Mr Walz immediately reported the incident to the Alliance High School principal, ceasing all of his extracurricular activities including coaching and offering to resign from his teaching job – an offer his boss talked him out of.

“He, I think, takes the position that he’s a role model for the students there,” Mr Horford said. “He let them down. He let himself down.” NYTIMES