Tim Kaine is not the dude, Barry...

No no no. This is a bad idea. Let's see about shutting down the Barack-Obama-Tim-Kaine rumor mill.

On the surface, Tim Kaine is a perfect match. The bumper stickers can say "O-K!" He was the first governor to come out for Obama. He ran on a platform of "smart growth" and "bipartisan solutions" -- thin gruel, but Virginia lapped it up, and it's perfectly of a piece with BHO's efforts to "overcome divisiveness." He's a Catholic, and thus opposes both abortion and capital punishment. On the stump, he's basically a non-entity, perfect for the Bucket of Warm Spit job. Anyway, so-called pragmatists will swoon over the possibility of recruiting this pro-choice Southern governor with middle-brow concerns: traffic, budgets, resources, crime.

There are numerous problems with this scenario, and they are all largely functions of the idea that a successful politics shoots for the mean of public opinion; that in order to get 50%-plus-one, you just tailor your message for the fifty-first percentile of human consciousness.

Confusion for seniors. Listen to it for a second. Johmmcain. ObamaKaine. Exit pollsters' nightmare...

Overkill. Virginia is already "in play." Kaine can't make it more "in play," and he's too much a carpetbagger and neophyte to guarantee it'll hold for Obama. And by itself, Virginia is transforming into New Jersey. Let's not gild the lily, shall we?

Obama needs a feral hound. Kaine is a namby-pamby. BHO is still being flogged for being a namby-pamby. We want two guys getting knocked for being incapable of making The Hard Decisions? Where is the Lyndon Johnson on this ticket? The John Nance Garner? The Spiro Agnew? Where is the advocate of muscular politics? Who is Obama's Cheney?

The biggie might actually be Kaine and wind. Kaine took in $135,000 from Dominion Power and is in turn backing a new coal-fired power plant for Wise County. Wise is too downtrodden a place to protest much, and coal is the last good job in Southwest Virginia. [Cf. WVTF on the Last Clinic in Galax. (mp3)] But BHO had better expect talk about The Shafting of Wise County; how, in effect, Kaine Administration policy is to redistribute income from the poor, rural Southwest and Southside to the rich, exurban North.

Kaine, to fight back, had better talk about wind...should be in this pdf somewhere..."there are environmental and community-related challenges" (p.81) to putting wind turbines in super-windy Highland County...

Will Kaine sit on wind in favor of coal gasification? Probably. Since he's found ways to strip-mine in the guise of producing "scenic vistas":

The “coal synergy” partnership will allow Alpha Natural Resources and Pioneer Coal to mine coal along the corridor and prepare a highway-worthy roadbed [...] coupling surface coal mining with building a highway.

Fuggedaboudit: BHO likes corn anyway...

Finally, that abominable State of the Union riposte. Cilizza is too kind; Tim Kaine's nervous tic does not make him look like The Rock. He looks weird; his writers suck; he's still learning the teleprompter, but that's all style. The content was the killer. Kaine lacks the Clintonian understanding that comforting the inconsolable does not jive with self-congratulation. You can't just go Katrina, Iraq, economy, then:

[...]we're moving ahead by focusing on service, competent management and results. It's all about bringing people together to find common-sense solutions to our common problems.
That's how we in Virginia earned the ranking of America's "Best Managed State."

It's tantamount to saying "I manage results for your pain."

In sum, Kaine represents the Built for Solutions, politics-of-no-politics that Mike Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Warner and Webb have been pimping for the bulk of this decade. It is the first baby step into the abyss of single-party government. No one can disagree with solving problems! The public, satisfied, retreats from political life. The political class proceeds to identify problems, develop and implement solutions...

The process is only halted when we remember that the cult of "competencies and skillsets" hides a little Auschwitz; that every solution is always already a Final Solution...
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