Tim Walz seemed like he had walked into a surprise party as he appeared on stage the other night in Philadelphia as the vice presidential running mate to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. He smiled broadly. He doubled over in laughter. He clapped. He led cheers. He yelled "wow" again and again and again.

But Walz should hardly be viewed as a surprise — or a party crasher. In fact, members of the Democratic Party ought to pay close attention to what is happening right before their eyes. Walz is the kind of Democrat who has long been missing from their party's leadership.

For years, Democrats have embraced a smarter-than-thou, cooler-than-you aura that has brought in plenty of campaign agenda-based donors but turned off far too many voters. Democrats don’t like to hear this. But it’s true. Former President Donald Trump’s followers galvanized around Hillary Clinton’s queen-of-smarts put-down that they were “deplorables.” And let’s not forget former President Barack Obama’s look-down-his-nose comment that far too many Midwestern conservatives “cling” to their guns and Bibles.

Words matter. And what snooty Democrats said about conservatives for years opened deep wounds, starting way back during the Reagan administration.

Walz now has a chance to be a political balm of sorts. Yes, this guy throws his share of political grenades. But at least he has a sense of humor. And he's definitely not trying to tell you he's smarter or cooler than everyone else.

Far too often, Democratic policies that the party's candidates were required to embrace seemed like they were hatched in grim graduate school seminars, not in real life, where people make compromises and know how to laugh a little at their foibles. At the same time, voters were all too often placed in silos of racial, gender and religious identities — some for the party to eagerly embrace, some to willfully ignore.

No wonder Trump’s followers in their self-described MAGA nation felt consigned to second-class status by Democratic “elites.” But Walz, 60, the two-term governor of Minnesota, now challenges that calcified elite mold that Democrats concocted. It's about time.

For starters, he’s not elite. Walz, with his linebacker body, looks like he belongs on a barstool at Cheers. In his spare time, he doesn’t wind-surf, like John Kerry. And, with his receding, gray Midwestern dad hair and a set of shoulders that tell you he has lifted a few bags of cement or dug a few ditches in his time, he definitely will never have that blow-dried John Edwards camera-ready look. As for the blue suit he wore on stage in Philadelphia, let’s just say that Walz seems a lot more comfortable in a T-shirt and jeans and a camouflage baseball cap that hunters prefer. And until he took the........

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