By Linda Verin
For The Birmingham Times
Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Senator Tim Kaine was in Birmingham last Friday and made his one public stop at the historic 16th Street Baptist Church.
Civil rights has long been a hallmark of Kaine’s political career. He spent 17 years focusing his law practice on housing discrimination and other civil rights issues winning a landmark “redlining” bigotry case plus helped found the Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness.
One day he got mad at the local city council so he decided to run. Kaine went from City Council to Mayor to Lt. Governor to Governor of Virginia and now VP nominee, never losing a single one of his eight races.
While in Birmingham where he also attended a fundraiser, Kaine was asked a number of questions about the upcoming presidential election including why he accepted the request to be on the ticket with Democratic Presidential nominee Secretary Hillary Clinton; healthcare and the millennial vote.
The Birmingham Times – Why did Secretary Clinton ask you to be her VP?
Tim Kaine: Secretary Clinton said to me “I want you to use your knowledge and experience with local and state government to figure out how we can work together to solve our most pressing problems at those levels to improve individual lives.’”
BT: What made you accept?
TK: “Strong women have always helped me get where I am including my wife and countless campaign workers. I am happy to pay that back if I can help elect the first woman president.”
BT: What can we expect from the Clinton/Kaine ticket if elected?
TK: “The first order of business for the Clinton/Kaine ticket if elected will be a focus on the economy/infrastructure, immigration reform and defeating ISIS.”
BT: How will you motivate the millennials to vote?
TK: “Millennials turned out in force in ’08 for Obama but did not show up in those numbers in later elections. Our campaign must prove that we believe in climate change, support immigration reform, reproductive choice and LGBT rights – issues that really matter to young people.”
Kaine said Clinton has a genuine desire to get input from others to reach practical solutions. The mark of success wouldn’t be if they passed bills but if towns and cities where residents lived, along with their schools, improved, Kaine said.
He cautioned that Clinton is trying to do something that has never been done – be the first woman elected “so we are the true underdog in this race and must fight like that,” he said.
Asked about health care, Kaine said that states that have not expanded Medicaid may decide to do so after Obama leaves. He said Republicans now wish they had accepted it for their people because they did such an injustice to their state.
Kaine is familiar with a lot of issues because of his term as mayor of Richmond.
As mayor he created a magnet school plus renovated other schools; the city’s murder rate fell 55 percent due in part to tougher gun crime penalties; he tackled racial problems by apologizing for Richmond’s part in slavery but then caused an uproar by agreeing that a portrait of Robert E. Lee should be included in historic murals.
According to Kaine, “Much of our history is not pleasant; you can’t whitewash it.” Yet the NY Times wrote Kaine “was by all accounts instrumental in bridging the city’s racial divide.”
While governor he had to deal with the mass shooting at Virginia Tech. The aftermath made him push for statewide mental health reforms.
Kaine was among the first governors to endorse Barack Obama and helped win the state for Obama by six points, the first time in over 40 years a Democratic presidential candidate won Virginia. The day after Obama became the first African-American to win the White House, Governor Kaine visited a civil rights memorial in Richmond. There, in a former capital of the Confederacy, he summed up the history-making moment in four words. “Ol’ Virginny is dead.”
