Clinton’s choice of a running mate could give her campaign momentum heading into the convention, as the fight for the White House begins a more than three-month push to the finish.
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In selecting Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia over progressive favorites such as Senators Elizabeth Warren of MA or Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Clinton is partnering with a lawmaker whose stances on finance and trade policies have sparked backlash from some of her most persistent critics.
Kaine could help Clinton in Virginia, a heavily contested swing state, and choosing Kaine will not cost Democrats a seat in the Senate, where Republicans now hold a majority, at 54 seats.
The announcement was made a short time ago.
Politically a center-left Democrat, with working-class roots and a spotless record both as governor and senator, he is also seen as helping Clinton win over votes from reluctant independent male voters – although at risk of alienating the party’s progressive left wing. “He’s never lost an election”.
“The dramatic changes in the platform and in the style of Hillary’s presentation that she’s putting forward are much stronger, bolder strategies to take on the big issues that were at the heart of the Sanders campaign”, Merkley said.
But such considerations would easily have been set aside, if Ms. Clinton and her team had identified pushing back against the establishment perceptions as an imperative on the path to the presidency.
But it would be another six days before Clinton settled on Kaine.
The pick comes as the Clinton campaign tries to paint newly anointed Republican nominee Donald Trump as divisive and risky, a theme they hit hard coming out of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. President Barack Obama said Friday the picture Trump painted of the nation “doesn’t really jive with the experience with most people”. When asked if he was boring, Clinton said, “I love that about him”.
She could have increased her ticket’s blue-collar appeal, especially in the battleground Rust Belt states, with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown – a scrappy free-trade critic who fishes in some of the same voter pools as Mr. Trump, but with a consistently liberal voting record. Even so, in his recent Virginia appearance, Kaine tried to show his ability to go on the offensive. Kaine himself compared Holton to Clinton at an Annandale, Virginia campaign event, pointing to Holton and Clinton’s public service commitments. Jack Reed, a fellow Democrat. “I think of El Progreso everyday”, Kaine said.
Kaine is Roman Catholic and took a break from Harvard Law School to serve as a missionary in Honduras in the early 1980s.
In the speech, Kaine said he felt it was appropriate to speak in his second language because Spanish – which has been spoken in the USA for hundreds of years – is still “spoken by more than 40 million Americans with a huge investment in the result of this debate”. In November 2013, I was proud to help the Senate pass theEmployment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to ensure that workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation will not be tolerated.
“Republicans will run hard against Democrats on trade this year”.
Kaine was given an audition of sorts on the trail last week, when he joined Clinton at a campaign stop in a gymnasium at a community college in Northern Virginia.
The two were warmly received by the crowd and had an easy rapport, though the atmosphere was not almost as electric it had been the month before when Clinton was joined at a rally in OH by Sen. Tim Kaine will be her running mate, with some praising his varied resume and others saying the choice did little to heal rifts with Bernie Sanders supporters.
Miller was likely referring to Kaine’s acceptance of more than $160,000 in gifts during his time as governor, benefiting from Virginia’s loose laws related to political gift giving. “It needs to be someone who whenever they walk into a room you are glad to see them and want to have them as part of any conversation”, the campaign official quoted Podesta telling her.
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Kaine, who married the daughter of a former Republican governor of Virginia, is at odds with his party’s mainstream on some issues.
