My first brush of politics with Tim Kaine involved turkeys, and breakfast at a Bob Evans.
It was 2004, and Pilgrims Pride had announced that it was closing a Rockingham County processing facility. A group of farmers was trying to come together to essentially take over the operation, which involved 170 farms and 1,800 employees.
They were meeting one spring morning, and Kaine, then the lieutenant governor, a part-time job in Virginia, drove to Harrisonburg to have breakfast with them at the Bob Evans.
The biggest obstacle facing the growers was red tape. Kaine promised to be their man in Richmond, but to be honest, that morning, in that restaurant, it seemed a battle so uphill that it just wasn’t going to happen.
It wasn’t that Kaine had saved the day that makes this story memorable to me. It’s that he was there in the first place.
Politics plays favorites, and the Shenandoah Valley, green as it is, isn’t what you think of as fertile ground for Democrats. Rockingham County and neighboring Augusta County routinely give Republicans 70 percent and up in state and national elections, making it easy for Democrats to write off the region west of the Blue Ridge in their time and effort calculus.
Except that Kaine and his cohort in Richmond then and Washington, D.C., now, Mark Warner, saw things differently. Dating back to their first run together for state office, in 2001, Warner and Kaine made an effort to compete with Republicans in the Valley and Southwest Virginia, and it wasn’t just shaking hands and kissing babies, and otherwise shoving Urban Crescent liberal policies down the throats of those in the red part of Virginia.
Warner is remembered for sponsoring a car in the NASCAR series and working to get Virginia Tech an invite into the Atlantic Coast Conference. Kaine took up the cause of those in the farming sector and as a senator has spent considerable political capital on career and technical education as a means of lifting working-class children in rural areas into the middle class.
Which are not sexy issues for headline writers, 24-hour cable channel producers or progressive bloggers, who look at the kind of grunt work that Kaine set himself to as reinforcing their characterization of Kaine as being “boring.”
Spoiler alert: Tim Kaine will bore you to death if you give him half the chance. The guy, for example. will talk sports minutiae with you to the point that you feel like NPR just launched a show for sabermetrics wonks, and this is the guy they hired to host it.
And then: he plays the harmonica. Total nerd, right? A sports geek who plays the harmonica, eats breakfast at Bob Evans, talks policy specifics without notes for 45 minutes to a small group of maybe a dozen people at a drive-in over burgers, onion wings and milkshakes.
He doesn’t tweet insults at rivals, threaten to shut down the government over a personal pique, doesn’t have a trophy third wife, won’t promise to dramatically cut taxes and even more dramatically increase spending to build walls and bomb enemies and neutrals into submission.
He will do what he did that day 12 years ago at breakfast in Harrisonburg, in that case pledging his support to a group of people who didn’t have a lot of time for blustering and posturing.
If you’re looking for blustering and posturing, there’s plenty of that readily available.
People like boring ol’ Tim Kaine are too busy getting the job done, and if you want to hold that against him, by all means.
– Column by Chris Graham
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