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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • July 20, 2016
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INSIDE
Battle over ex-felon votes - 2 Local business spotlight - 3 is black America in revolt? - 6 State lab testing for Zika - 14
Richmond & Hampton Roads
GOP gathers in Ohio LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE
Kaine as veep: Would he be too boring? STAFF & WIRE Tim Kaine does not thunder. While introducing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at a rally last week, the Virginia senator lit into her Republican opponent rhetorically, but with a delivery that was more Sunday school teacher than fire breather. “I’ll tell you one that gets me steamed,” Kaine said, pointing to one of Donald Trump’s myriad controversial statements—but he didn’t really sound at all that “steamed.” Being seen as a nice guy is usually a handicap for those competing to become vice president. Presidential candidates tend to choose attack dogs, people who can go after the opposing nominees while they keep their hands clean. Being a white guy could also work against Kaine, given the Democratic Party’s increasingly diverse makeup. At 58 years old, Kaine is significantly younger than Clinton, but he is still a baby boomer, with the receding hairline and burgeoning paunch to show for it. It’s hardly an image that screams “fresh face,” particularly compared to other potential VP picks like Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro or New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, minorities in their mid-40s. Yes, Kaine checks all the boxes a presidential candidate could want in a VP. Ivy League pedigree? Graduated from Harvard Law School. Executive experience? Served as mayor of Richmond and governor of Virginia. From a swing state? These days, Virginia is as purple as it gets. But while those are all solid resume builders, they’re hardly the sort of activist profile that’s going to make the Democratic base to swoon. That’s something Clinton is no doubt weighing as she prepares to make her vice presidential pick in the next week. “It’s true,” Kaine admitted on NBC’s Meet the Press last month, “I am boring.” Personable but unassuming, he’s not the type who, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, will engage in Twitter wars with Trump. In Virginia, he built a reputation as a consensusbuilder, not a bold thinker, while governing as a Democrat in a traditionally conservative state. Dig beneath the surface, however, and another picture starts to emerge, one that’s a lot more colorful than the vanilla first impression. It turns out that this career politician actually has a pretty radical streak running through him: a fierce, Jesuit-inspired commitment to social justice and racial equality that was very much at odds with the consensus in his Southern state at the time he was building his career. Kaine declined to be interviewed for this article, but in the past he has credited his deep Catholic faith and a life-changing year as a missionary in poverty-stricken Central America for his foray into public service and politics. Speaking to Charlie Rose in 2008, Kaine said the year he took off during law school to volunteer with Jesuit
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Hillary Clinton campaigns with U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine.
Clinton speaks at NAACP conference Hillary Clinton used her NAACP speech this week to launch an effort to register more than three million voters. The presumptive Democratic nominee visited Cincinnati for the civil rights group’s annual convention, as the GOP gathered at the northern end of perennial swing-state Ohio. Her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, declined the NAACP’s invitation to address the convention. Clinton’s efforts to register more voters – urging them to commit to vote for her – came as a Washington Post-ABC News poll earlier in the week shows her leading Trump among all adults, but trailing among registered voters. Her efforts are focused in part on millennials, Latino and black voters. Trump, the poll shows, is leading by 15 points among white voters, while Clinton has a 52-point lead among people of color. Clinton relied heavily on the support of black voters to defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic primaries, and, until recent news events, it remained an open question how much Clinton would emphasize race relations and an overhaul of the criminal justice system in a general election. But after the shootings of several black men by police officers, an ambush in Dallas that left five police officers dead, and the killing of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Clinton has spoken at length about her vow to work to end “systemic racism” and to better integrate police forces into the communities in which they serve. The event was intended as an implicit contrast to Trump, whom black voters have largely rejected, according to recent polls, and whom Clinton has accused of stoking racial tensions.