Kaine 5 takeaways

5 takeaways on Tim Kaine

The rap on Hillary Clinton’s VP pick is that he’s boring. But he’s boring like a fox.

By Glenn Thrush

Tim Kaine is vanilla, but he’s the textured, whole-bean Breyer’s kind.

The solid, occasionally stolid Virginia senator is fond of making fun of his own blandness ("boring is the fastest-growing demographic in this country," he wryly told an interviewer a couple of weeks ago). But his neutral-tone personality isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a year of nothing but hellfire reds, and both presidential candidates have now succeeded in selecting running mates who are guaranteed to be less detestable than their widely reviled electoral selves.

From an organizational perspective, the Kaine pick illustrates Hillary Clinton’s major advantage over her chaos-loving competitor. It was a seamless, steely rollout and — I’m stealing the next line from POLITICO’s Hillary reporter Annie Karni — amazingly, the damn thing didn’t leak. The most news organizations could pry out of the typically talkative Clinton camp was that Kaine was “likely” to be her pick.

It also reveals an element of Clinton’s political character that is marginally less flattering, despite her love-and-kindness aspirations: She wants to win, and badly, and chose a No. 2 with whom she doesn’t share a deep personal bond (she is much closer to Labor Secretary Tom Perez, for instance) but a common will to win.

In a telling comment, just before Kaine’s selection was announced in a text to supporters, she explicitly linked affection to election: “I love that about him,” Clinton told a PBS interviewer. “He’s never lost an election.”

Kaine was picked to shore up Clinton’s trust issues. Like his Trumpian counterpart, Mike Pence, the 57-year-old former commonwealth governor was selected to bolster his boss’ most glaring weakness. Voters view Donald Trump as a sugar-high 10-year-old who just hijacked an Abrams tank; Clinton’s problem — thanks to emails, Goldman Sachs, yadda-yadda — is that even many of her supporters wouldn’t trust her with an unattended purse.

In that regard, Pence and Kaine are working the same side of the street, that is to say, the sunnier side. Pence projects the oh-gosh steadiness of a high school principal who picks up a stray candy wrapper while he is asking about your kids; Kaine is the guy who spent a year in Honduras teaching school to poor kids and another six coaching lawyers on ethics at the University of Richmond Law School. As mayor of Virginia’s capital, and later in the statehouse, he earned a clean-hands reputation — and you will not find any one of his Senate colleagues on either side of the aisle evince a single nasty thing about him.

Unlike Trump, who can’t stand to share the stage with an ally for too long (as evidenced by his bizarre shake-my-hand-and-beat-it rollout of Pence in a dimly lit New York hotel ballroom last week), Clinton is more than happy to hug a guy who will make her seem more trustworthy and less, well, Clintonesque.

It was always going to be Kaine. The two Toms (Vilsack and Perez) never had a chance. Clinton didn’t “officially” make up her mind to pick Kaine until earlier this week, according to the canned tick-tock talking points coming out of Brooklyn. That’s the same shtick they used when they said she didn’t “officially” make up her mind to run for president until December 2014 — despite assembling a campaign team six months earlier.

People close to Clinton were telling me as early as February that there really wasn’t anyone else on their short list. The main reason Clinton chose Kaine is so simple as to be unbelievable: She thinks he could serve as president if she can’t, and didn’t think anyone else she talked to fit that criterion. “She’s been in the White House, and knows the kind of person who can really do the job. … He gives off president vibes. And that’s all that mattered to Hillary,” one longtime friend told me earlier in the summer.

A caveat. Both Clintons are notorious last-minute decision-makers and did, in reality, re-audition Kaine (they worried he was too boring, and staffers watched his audition/joint appearance with her in Virginia last week as one final test). But Perez, Vilsack, James Stavridis, Cory Booker — they never had a chance.

Wine and Redskins tickets! Kaine has never been the subject of any major (or even minor) scandals, but he’s been in government long enough to do a few things that provide fodder for the Trump attack squad. The biggest: Last month, POLITICO’s Isaac Arnsdorf reported that Kaine took about $160,000 in gifts from well-off pals — included executives for a utility company and drug firm — over the course of a decade in Virginia’s two highest posts.

He broke no rules under the state’s lax gift laws, but according to public disclosure forms, Kaine took advantage of the laws to receive an $18,000 Caribbean vacation, $5,500 in clothes, wine, Redskins tickets and a trip to watch George Mason University play in the NCAA basketball Final Four during his years as lieutenant governor and governor. “Senator Kaine went beyond the requirements of Virginia law, even publicly disclosing gifts of value beneath the reporting threshold,” his spokesperson told POLITICO. “He’s confident that he met both the letter and the spirit of Virginia’s ethical standards.”

But all’s fair — and within an hour of Clinton’s pick, Trump’s comms guy released a statement blasting the mild-mannered sidekick as a self-dealing spawn of Clinton sleaze. “It's only fitting that Hillary Clinton would select an ethically challenged insider like Tim Kaine who’s personally benefited from the rigged system. … If you think Crooked Hillary and Corrupt Kaine are going to change anything in Washington, it's just the opposite. They do well by the current system, while the rest of America gets left behind.”

He’s not black or Hispanic, but … As Americans increasingly hunker down in their partisan trenches, the idea of a vice-presidential candidate pulling undecided or independent voters into the fold has faded as a political imperative. It’s all about that base — and Pence’s pick was, in part, intended to minimize the damage Ted Cruz’s public rejection of Trump would inflict on the nominee’s standing among conservative freedom-and-values voters. Kaine, the scion of the Scots-Irish, is as well positioned to appeal to the party’s African-American and Hispanic base as any white politician.

He speaks Spanish pretty fluently (a vestige of his work in Honduras) and has been a member of a black Catholic church in Richmond for decades. His lack of electrifying rhetorical charisma is offset by an uncommon sensitivity to the tone of conversation in minority communities. If you watch YouTube clips of his speeches, you’ll notice Kaine — so vanilla on the Sunday shows — catches fire at the pulpit or on a city street corner.

Three states. Kaine is from purple-blue Virginia, which borders purple-red North Carolina, and his announcement will take place in who-the-hell-knows-what-they-are-Florida. If Clinton wins these three states, Trump goes back to selling steaks.