There were a lot of things in Tim Walz’s favour to propel him on to the Democratic ticket as the pick for VP. A former teacher, former football coach and salt-of-the-earth Nebraskan with a history of flipping strong Republican seats, Walz looks like the kind of guy who would stop to tow your car out of a ditch, even if it was carrying a Donald Trump bumper sticker. He has a degree from a modest state college. He has served in the military. And yet, one suspects, the single detail that won the 60-year-old the job was his emperor’s clothes use of the word “weird”.

On Tuesday, Walz appeared in Philadelphia alongside Kamala Harris in their first joint appearance and – apart from the mind-blowing revelation that Walz, who looks as if he might have served in Vietnam, is approximately the same age as Harris – two things became immediately clear. That the governor of Minnesota has the ease and charm of a natural politician that Harris, on a bad day, can lack. And that he will present his Republican counterpart, JD Vance, with a gratifyingly large problem.

That problem is authenticity, one of the major absurdist planks of Trump’s campaign, in which the........

© The Guardian