Crooked Hillary Clinton announced her VP choice on Friday, a useful strategy to get no news attention. She will have the official presentation to the world on Saturday. So far, she has used her right to remain silent in her interactions with the press. Given her dubious health status, the chance of her VP having to take over is high enough that he might be President some day.
Tim Kaine is fairly similar to Mike Pence in his background and politics. Tim Kaine is 58 years old and currently the junior US Senator from Virginia, serving since 2013. He was the head of the Democratic National Committee in between being Governor and Senator.
He was Governor of Virginia from 2006-2010, and before that Mayor of Richmond – the former capital of the Confederacy. He is a Harvard trained lawyer who was born in the people’s Republic of Minnesota and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. His parents are Scottish and Irish and he is a Roman Catholic. He has one wife and only three children.
His most noteworthy accomplishment as mayor (an appointed position) was to redirect gun crimes to Federal Courts where defendants faced mandatory 5 year sentences under Public Law 105-386 signed into law by Bill Clinton in November 1998. It expanded mandatory sentences to include possession of a gun during a drug crime as a federal crime. Mandatory sentences were originally added under Ronald Reagan in 1984, passed by a Democratically controlled Congress.
As Governor of Virginia, he didn’t do much since Republicans controlled the legislature. He was able to ban smoking in Virginia government buildings by executive order.
Kaine backed Obama in 2008 over Hillary Clinton, and Obama backed him as governor. If he is Obama’s guy, once he is in place, a sudden indictment of Hillary could be quite useful. The FBI recommended no prosecution, but in the end it isn’t their decision.
As Senator since 2013, he has served on Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. As a member of the minority party in the Senate, he has had very little influence in his 3 years in the Senate.
Kaine picked up his fluency in Spanish during a year he spent in Honduras in 1980 working with Jesuit missionaries. I doubt with one year of immersion 35 years ago that he is fluent, as much as has the ability to read Spanish.
After taking off a year in Honduras, he returned to Harvard and was pursued by his wife who wanted to use her Harvard law degree to help poor people as a Legal Aid lawyer. She is the daughter of a former Virginia governor Linwood Holton who served as Virginia Governor. from 1970-1974. Linwood Holton is in his 90s, living in Southern Virginia. Linwood Holton is a Republican and worked in the Nixon administration.
Kaine, as a good Catholic, is personally opposed to abortion, but pro-choice, trying to split the difference. He is less pro-choice than his peers. He supports informed consent, parental notification and a ban on post viability abortions. Since Donald Trump is pro choice, abortion isn’t likely to dominate the issues in this election.
Political Views in general – he gave the answers you would expect as a moderate democrat. The answers that might be interesting are his opposition to free trade and his agreement that marijuana is a “gateway drug”.
He is not going to attract Bernie Sanders supporters, but in the end – what difference do they make ???
