Va. governor could help fill gap for Obama: Centrist seen as dark horse among VP possibilities By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff, June 12, 2008
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – He is the popular governor of a critical swing state. He has working-class roots and a Harvard degree, and strong support from both business and labor. He is a devout Catholic and speaks fluent Spanish, and was the first governor outside Illinois to endorse Barack Obama for president.
Governor Tim Kaine is probably the least well known of the trio of rising Democratic stars from Virginia. The others – US Senator Jim Webb, the flame-throwing author and former Navy secretary, and former governor Mark Warner, the wealthy venture capitalist who briefly flirted with a presidential run – are regularly listed as vice presidential possibilities.
But Kaine’s biography and political resume fill many of the perceived gaps in Obama’s profile, making him for some analysts a dark horse in veepstakes 2008.
“The case for him is Virginia is a competitive state this time around, and he is kind of a centrist,” said Dan Palazzolo, a political scientist at the University of Richmond. “He’s prolife, basically, and he’s got this probusiness background. He’s also a big supporter of Obama.”
But, as Palazzolo notes, Kaine has no military or foreign policy experience, credentials Obama also lacks and that could prove a detriment for Republican John McCain, a Navy veteran and former prisoner of war who has traveled extensively around the world during his 22 years in the US Senate. “I think they’re substantial downsides,” Palazzolo said.
Obama, though, clearly has warm feelings for Kaine, who befriended the Illinois senator when he came to Virginia to stump for Kaine in 2005. (They discovered that their mothers came from the same small town in Kansas.) Campaigning in Virginia last week, Obama appeared with all three of Virginia’s Democratic notables, but he reserved special affection for Kaine.
“When you’re in the political business, there are a lot of people who are your allies, there are a lot of people who you’ve got to do business with, but you don’t always have a lot of friends,” Obama said at a rally, according to the Washington Post’s Virginia Politics blog. “The governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia is my friend.”
My own candidate for Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee would be Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, D-KS. She is a wildly popular, twice-elected governor of a reliably Republican state, Kansas. She has a reputation as a consensus builder who works across the party lines to get the job done for voters. I had also thought that she may help Sen. Barack Obama assuage hurt feelings over defeating the strongest female candidate to ever run for president.
She was an early endorser of Obama who campaigned for him in several states. She is term-limited and cannot run for a third term.
Webb is a former Republican who served as secretary of the Navy under Reagan, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and he is very vocal about his opposition to the current Iraq war, although he has a son serving there. Webb, in fact, matches McCain in war heroism and his younger and has better sense than McCain seems to have.