As Barack Obama’s cavalcade of dramatic post-primary position changes advanced, he momentarily threw off his detractors.
Just who was this guy? A naïve idealist who would promise a complete withdrawal from Iraq in less than a year and a half, would hold a summit with Ahmadinejad without preconditions, unilaterally withdraw from NAFTA, and oppose any development of additional nuclear power plants? Or a ruthlessly flexible pragmatist, who would adjust his Iraq plan to circumstances, demand vague “preparations” before meeting dictators, dismiss his previous NAFTA rhetoric as “overheated,” and declare that nuclear power has to be “part of the mix”?
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We may have our answer soon. If Obama selects Virginia Governor Tim Kaine as his running mate, he might as well write “NAÏVE IDEALIST” in fireworks above the announcement ceremony.
Democrats and Obama’s allies would inevitably do their best to put the finest lipstick on the oinker of a Kaine selection. But it would be a catastrophic mistake politically and a fascinating window into how faulty Obama’s decision making is.
Since he clinched the nomination, the criticism of Obama that has gained the most traction is the question, “Is he ready?” Americans generally like Obama, and he polls well on almost all of the big issues this year. The two poll questions he collapses on are, “who has more knowledge and experience to be president?” and “which candidate would be a good commander-in-chief?”
Obama has repeatedly said that he doesn’t see those questions as his weaknesses, and he doesn’t feel any particular need to have a running mate with strengths in those areas. A selection of Kaine would show he means it, and would be an implicit message to voters: Take those concerns and go pound sand. You have to look really hard to find a potential veep with less time as a senator or governor than Obama, but Kaine is one of them. Kaine has been governor for about two and a half years; Obama has been a senator about three and a half years. Rather than broaden the ticket’s breadth of knowledge, Kaine’s greatest areas of expertise are probably urban issues (as former mayor of Richmond) and civil-rights law (from his private practice) — the two areas Obama probably knows most about.
There have been plenty of missteps in other areas. A columnist for Kaine’s hometown paper
labels him “naif on diplomacy, defense and the national economy”; the news pages write that his “enthusiasm, however, cannot mask a record as governor that even Democrats describe as mixed.” Transportation issues have been the biggest disappointment, and while the presence of illegal immigrants has stirred furious passions in his state and spurred the creation of local ordinances cracking down on employing them, Kaine created a commission to “study the costs and benefits that immigration is having on the Commonwealth.”
His official gubernatorial biography touts the state remaining on
Forbes’s list of the most business-friendly states in America, but the state dropped out of
Forbes’s top ten in business costs and economic climate during Kaine’s tenure.
Obama and Kaine would be the most inexperienced pair to hit Washington in modern history. Then-one-term-governor Jimmy Carter at least had Walter Mondale, who had been a senator for 12 years. Bill Clinton and Al Gore look like seasoned old pros by comparison.
