Sometimes on our farm a nice car would roll up the gravel driveway and a man in a slick suit would get out. He would either be trying to sell us something overpriced that we’d never buy, because of our limited means and common sense, or trying to buy something we’d never sell — namely land, about which my grandfather said, “You don’t get rid of it, because they don’t make any more of it.”

This man would shake our hands before driving off.

“Better count your fingers,” Grandpa Arnie would tell us and laugh.

I’ve shared the story before to explain the gulf I’ve long felt between the essence of the rural white working poor who raised me — honest, flawed people who would welcome just about anyone into our home but a liar — and the red-hatted-fool avatar they’ve been assigned in national discourse.

What a relief, then, to see emerge on the national stage the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, who embodies the earnest, humane, rural people who shaped me and the prairie populism that shaped the progressive foundations of the Great Plains.

Mr. Walz went to a state college, taught public high school and went into government — more than a couple class rungs above my grandfather, who in the 1940s left school after sixth grade to work the Kansas wheat fields with his German American dad.

But when Mr. Walz smiles and his eyes disappear into a good-natured squint — say, while holding a piglet like a baby at a state fair — I see Grandpa Arnie.