Politics is about power, and we tend to look unfavorably on those who jump into it with an abundance of enthusiasm. We tend to think: What the heck is wrong with this guy?

Take Joe Biden, for example. As Richard Ben Cramer told us in What It Takes, his magisterial work on the 1988 presidential campaign, Biden had been seeking the presidency all his life. Indeed, he told his girlfriend’s parents as much when he was still in high school.

Biden, though, had always been a resounding failure as a candidate. And he was heading for the same result in 2020 when Democrat power brokers pulled him off the deck, propped him up against front-running socialist Bernie Sanders, and somehow found 81 million votes for him against Donald Trump.

Along the way, Biden latched onto a compelling political narrative. Never mind that it hinged on a despicable lie. Such details don’t matter to Democrats. As NPR reports: “The events of Aug. 12, 2017, were so shocking that they motivated Joe Biden, who had mostly retired from political life, to run for president against Donald Trump. He said hearing Trump saying there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ that day in Charlottesville was a defining moment. ‘In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,’ Biden says in his 2019 video announcing his run for president.”

Now consider what Minnesota Governor and Democrat VP nominee Tim Walz is saying about his own raison d'être, his own political moment of truth: “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.”

Never mind that Walz was a Maoist high school teacher or that he was an unpaid assistant football coach. What’s important is that his story is noble and his motives are pure. He was referring to an incident that allegedly took place at a political rally two decades ago. The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reports:

In Walz’s telling, the “folksy” high school teacher and two of his students attended a campaign rally for President George W. Bush as an educational experience. However, Walz says, all three of them were denied entry upon event staffers noticing a John Kerry sticker on one of the students’ wallets — an exchange that the Atlantic dubbed a “KGB-style interrogation.”

There’s just one problem: This version of the political origin story for the Democratic vice presidential nominee, who is already facing “stolen valor” accusations over claims about his military service from combat veterans, contains significant inaccuracies.

In fact, there was no “field trip.” Nor were either of the two young people whom Walz accompanied to the rally his students. And days earlier, those same two non-students had been antagonizing Bush campaign officials. But other than that, the story was accurate. As Kaminsky adds, “The teenagers were heard making ‘unfavorable comments’ about Bush as they waited in line and were initially denied tickets, according to an archived news report.”

So the Bush campaign denied tickets to the two Democrat Party troublemakers, which has long been standard practice among political campaigns. Walz, though, was admitted without incident.

But was this non-outrage really the defining moment in his political life? You tell us: Here’s a picture of Walz carrying a sign that reads “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry,” even though the deployment-dodging, valor-stealing, ChiCom-sympathizing Walz was never an Enduring Freedom veteran.

Thus, the origin story, the carefully crafted political narrative of Kamala Harris’s running mate, is mostly a fabrication. And when we add this to his existing litany of lies, we see a political candidate who can’t be trusted to tell even simple truths.

No wonder Walz seems to be dragging down Harris’s numbers in his home state. Minnesotans, after all, are the people who know Walz best.

As Minnesota’s own John Hinderaker puts it, “Walz’s depiction of himself as an innocent high school geography teacher, uninvolved in politics until he and his students were wronged by George W. Bush, is false — like pretty much everything Walz says. Any time Tim Walz is talking, if you assume that he is lying, you are probably right.”