The former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin took to X (formerly Twitter) this week to vent about past treatment of her 16-year-old son, Trig Palin, who was a very young child when Palin was picked to run alongside John McCain in 2008. “The lies, conspiracy theories, death-wishes and death threats against him that continue to this day are the most brutal part of my political life,” she wrote. “Remove the partisanship, eliminate double standards regarding respecting children with special needs.”
Palin was moved to react, of course, due to the widespread anger of Democrats at a few on the right who mocked the enthusiasm of the 17-year-old son of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz when the cameras at the Democratic National Convention captured his clearly evident, and deeply moving, pride in his dad’s achievement.
Memories are short these days, but Palin had a point.
Back in 2008, the left-leaning website Wonkette ran a satirical piece mocking her young son; there was a swift backlash that proved strikingly effective with the site’s advertisers. As we recall, Wonkette, which now lives on Substack, hardly was alone. All kinds of fun was had on the left at the expense of Palin’s eclectic kids. The former Alaska governor was a maverick who wore her heart, her conservative ideology, and her family all on her sleeve. She was so different from mainstream political figures that her political opponents did not know how to respond, much as Trump does not know how to respond now to the new Democratic team of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
On the left, the response back then generally fell along the lines of, Palin was using her family as a prop. They were part of both her personal and her political biography and that made them fair game, the thinking went. Reading over all that so-called humor, not to mention the bevy of then-popular conspiracy theories about Palin’s family, makes for an uncomfortable experience from the vantage point of today’s sensibilities. And there also is plenty to be uncomfortable about when it comes to people going after the young Walz.
This situation became a local headline in Chicago after two conservative media figures, Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson, started riffing on Aug. 22 on WIND talk radio about Gus Walz, mocking the very scene that so many Americans found so moving.
Here was one of the few truly authentic moments on offer in either political convention this summer: a young man who was saying, in essence, you’re all sitting there looking at some political nominee. But, dude, that’s my dad up there, being nominated for vice president of the United States. My dad. How cool is that?
Very, Gus.
And any parent knows that kind of reaction from your kid — no matter their age or whatever else may differentiate them from the so-called norm — means more than all the “Coach Walz” signs in the world, especially since they were being handed out at the United Center by party operatives. Tim Walz strikes us as a decent guy but who is by no means at his first political rodeo, whatever kind of Mayberry-esque, “Friday Night Lights” kind of gauze the Democrats were trying to pin on him. But you could read the delight on the candidate’s face in that moment; kids have that kind of power.
Jacobson and Proft were staggeringly tone-deaf. Not very long ago, this was the kind of exchange that you’d probably have been far more likely to see at a Republican convention, given the GOP’s former deep commitment to showcasing family values. There was plenty to mock at the DNC for those inclined to push back against its forced conformity; going after young Walz‘s emotional reaction was about the worst for the gadfly jocks to pick, precisely because it was so unscripted and genuine. They could have had plenty of morning-zoo fun at some 15,000 people dutifully reciting “When we fight, we win,” like so many sheep, and had no argument from us.
But, really, Gus Walz? He was about the best thing in the room. As any fool could see.
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The backlash was intense. By Wednesday, Jacobson had, reportedly under massive pressure from parents, resigned her role as volleyball coach at Amundsen High School in Chicago. This was a development rich in irony; a coach made her exit as coach after mocking the kid of another (former) coach. Principal Kristi Eilers wrote to parents: “Effective immediately, Coach Amy Jacobson is no longer part of the athletic program at Amundsen.”
Was that excessive? Probably. A contrite apology might have sufficed without affecting an unrelated volleyball team. We’ve listened to the broadcast in question, and we’ve heard shock jocks say far worse. This is a political season in an overwhelmingly Democratic city and media landscape, which explains some of the outrage at Jacobson. An argument could be made that the DNC went out of its way to celebrate family: its two new political stars were deliberately introduced by family members and personal friends as part of building out their sympathetic stories. You could thus argue that once that kind of mythmaking is put with such intentionality into the political arena, the other side should be free to criticize the narrative construction.
This is more complex than you might first think. On the one hand, relatives don’t ask for the spotlight or gain its political power, even as their lives are upended. On the other, they can be relevant. We thought it strange that Harris’ father, Stanford Professor Emeritus Donald J. Harris, was so scrubbed from the biography presented about his daughter, even though the elder Harris is a living, world-class economist whose ideas surely were introduced while his girls were young. What was said to a potential future president, and to what extent she intuited the ideas, is both something relevant to voters and a current unknown.
But a candidate’s parents are not the same as her teenaged kids and, really, none of that excuses the juvenility of Jacobson and Proft. They were wrong. They also were hardly helping their own cause. What kind of decent Republican would have an issue with a kid expressing love for his dad? That, supposedly, is something the GOP believes in at its core.
Or once did.
Frankly, we doubt Gus Walz either wants or needs us (and any others like us) to rise to his defense. At the DNC, he appeared to us to be a fine young man, in need of no one’s protection or condescension and, assuming he’s afforded the most basic respect, perfectly capable of making his own case and his own way.
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