TIM KAINE’S RADICAL OPTIMISM
On a recent morning in Washington, D.C., Tim Kaine, the Democratic nominee for Vice-President, ambled into a room at the Jefferson Hotel and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Tim.” With thinning gray-brown hair, sensible rubber-soled loafers, and an expression of surprised contentment, he looked, at fifty-eight, like the happy customer in an insurance commercial. Despite more than two decades in politics—he has been a governor of Virginia and the head of the Democratic National Committee, and is now a member of the U.S. Senate—he is unassuming to the point of obscurity. In September, more than six weeks after he became Hillary Clinton’s running mate, forty per cent of voters said that they had never heard of Tim Kaine or had no opinion of him, according to a CNN/ORC International poll.
The absence of slickness has been mostly for the good. Paired with one of the best-known and least-trusted nominees in Presidential history, Kaine has helped the Clinton campaign look less frosty and stage-managed. Last week, as women came forward to accuse Donald Trump of groping them, the Times columnist Gail Collins suggested that “boring people have never looked better.” Kaine spent years cultivating his reputation for approachability, and he has parted with it grudgingly. Once he became the nominee, his wife, Anne Holton, a lawyer and former Virginia secretary of education, continued driving the family’s Volkswagen Jetta around Richmond, until Secret Service personnel prevailed upon her to accept a ride from them. In Kaine’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, he touted his Midwestern roots, and mocked Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “Believe me!,” inspiring a round of dad jokes online. (“Tim Kaine is your friend’s dad who catches you smoking weed at a sleepover and doesn’t rat you out but talks to you about brain development.”)
When we met, Kaine was back in Washington, after a string of campaign stops, to cast two votes in the Senate. Earlier in the week, he had appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” where the host had arranged a surprise visit by John Popper, the harmonica maestro from Blues Traveler. Kaine is a harmonica buff who has performed in a bluegrass bar band called the Jugbusters. Popper left him starstruck. “After Toots Thielemans died, he’s now the man,” Kaine told me. “Toots Thielemans was the man, and played a different style—Toots played chromatic and was a jazz player—but, since he died, Popper’s the guy.” Popper had given Kaine a copy of his memoir (“Suck and Blow”), and he was midway through it. “I’ve been on a string of music books, so I read Elvis Costello’s autobiography. I read this book by Bob Mehr—who worked for the Memphis Appeal—called ‘Trouble Boys,’ about the Replacements, a band that I really love,” Kaine went on. “Then I have another book—it’s called ‘The Saint and the Sultan’—that I’m halfway through, about this weird moment in St. Francis of Assisi’s life, where he went to Egypt to meet with one of the main religious leaders to try to broker an end to the Crusades. I didn’t know that part of his life.”
A devout Roman Catholic, Kaine is more comfortable quoting Scripture than any Democrat to reach the level of Presidential politics since Jimmy Carter. Asked to name his heroes, Kaine begins with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazis for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. For more than three decades, Kaine and his family have attended St. Elizabeth’s, a traditionally black church in Richmond. “We deliberately put ourselves in a position where we are in a racial minority,” Holton told me. “Our African-American friends have done that all their lives in one context or another. There is insight that we can learn.” She went on, “It’s no longer just the divide between black and white. Virginia’s gotten more diverse, but how do we come together across differences of all sorts?”
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