Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made up major aspects of the so-called “origin story” of his political career, in which he was ostensibly turned away from a 2004 re-election campaign rally for President George W. Bush and promptly vowed to run for public office.
Walz, then a high school geography teacher, has alleged that he and two of his students were held up by security and “denied entry” to the event because one of the youths had a sticker on his wallet supporting Bush’s opponent, then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).
However, the Washington Examiner reported Friday, citing sources and high school records, that neither of the teens were Walz’s students and were not refused a spot at the Bush rally because of the Kerry sticker.
Walz also was not a disinterested observer of the 2004 race, having picketed Bush as a “Veteran for Kerry” days before the campaign event in Mankato.
“It’s clear he was politically involved before that moment,” Chris Faulkner, a former Bush campaign aide who worked the rally in question, told the Examiner. “He was protesting in front of the ticket distribution center. It’s all bulls–t.”
“He was looking for an origin story,” Faulkner added of Walz. “And he made one up.”
The students, Matt Klaber and Nick Burkhart, had initially been denied tickets to an earlier Bush event “after making unfavorable comments” about the 43rd president, according to a contemporary news report by a local CBS affiliate, which prompted Republican campaign aides to reach back out and offer them tickets to a later rally.
In a Twitter post on Aug. 6, after Walz was announced as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Klaber said his and Burkhart’s families had asked the future Democratic governor to escort them to the event.
At the time, Klaber was a graduate of Mankato West Senior High School, where Walz taught — though he never took a class with him — and was a member of the Gustavus College Democrats.
Burkhart graduated from a different high school, Mankato East, according to the Examiner.
On the day, while the group waited in line, Bush campaign staffers told them that Klaber and Burkhart had been flagged as threats to cause a disruption by the Secret Service and could not go in. Walz, however, reportedly was admitted to the event — despite later claiming the snub by the Bush campaign helped him spontaneously decide to throw his lot in with Kerry and become a campaign aide.
During his successful 2006 run for Congress, for which Klaber and Burkhart volunteered, Walz would recount his indignation over the incident.
“As a soldier, I told them I had a right to see my commander in chief,” he was quoted by the Atlantic as saying during one rally that year.
Mankato’s then-mayor, John Brady, referenced the rally in a farewell speech for Walz just one month after he won election to the US House of Representatives.
Brady claimed that he had a dream on Election Night, intoning “In the dream I heard a voice: ‘You can keep me out of the quarry [the site of the Bush rally], but you can’t keep me out of Washington.’”
“He believed everyone should be allowed to see their president, regardless of political affiliation,” an op-ed writer for the Mankato Free Press framed the incident in 2018, shortly after Walz was elected governor of Minnesota. “And being told these students weren’t welcomed in this rally, well, that didn’t seem to Walz like an American thing to do.”
“Having just returned from military duty in Italy in support of Operation Enduring Freedom I wished to hear directly from the President and my students, regardless of political party, deserved to witness the historical moment of a sitting president coming to our city,” Walz piled on in an August 2020 thread on Twitter, now X.
“Above all, I was struck by how deeply divided our country was becoming that a veteran & a group of high schoolers would be turned away at the door,” Walz added. “It was at this moment that I decided to run for office. While I had a passion for politics, I had never been overly involved in political campaigns, and many people thought that a high school teacher and football coach didn’t stand a chance.”
Months later, Burkhart denied that the Bush aides even noticed his Kerry sticker.
“I wasn’t so daft to wear a Kerry sticker to a rally, it was on my wallet, in my pocket,” he posted on X in January 2021.
During his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago earlier this month, Walz said his time as a high school football coach and teacher launched his campaign for elected office.
“It was those players and my students who inspired me to run for Congress,” he told the Democratic delegates. “They saw in me what I had hoped to instill in them: a commitment to the common good, an understanding that we’re all in this together, and the belief that a single person can make a real difference for their neighbors.”
The Harris-Walz campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
