bdmetronews desk ॥ Hillary Clinton announced Friday that she has picked Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate, making a safe, centrist choice that will likely disappoint some in the progressive wing of her party.
“I’m thrilled to tell you this first: I’ve chosen Sen. Tim Kaine as my running mate,” Clinton wrote in a text message to her supporters Friday night.
Clinton is expected to appear with Kaine this weekend in South Florida, where the 58-year-old former governor of Virginia will likely show off his fluent Spanish picked up in his younger days during a year in Honduras working alongside missionaries. The pair is set to campaign together in Miami on Saturday and then head to the Democratic National Convention next week.
Kaine offers Clinton many strengths as a running mate: He has foreign policy experience from his time on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committee in the Senate, he can boost her chances to win the battleground state of Virginia, and he has a squeaky-clean, nice guy image that could help Clinton with her trust issues among voters. Kaine is self-admittedly “boring,” and is a middle-aged white man, but he also speaks fluent Spanish and has attended a predominantly black church for two decades, suggesting he could be better than expected at minority voter outreach.
What Kaine is not, however, is an attack dog. He’s also not a liberal stalwart able to draw disaffected supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders to the ticket, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was considered for the VP job, as well. When Clinton and Kaine appeared at a rally together in Annandale, Va., last week, Kaine debuted family-friendly attack lines against Trump, calling him a “me-first” candidate who “trash talks” Latinos, women and others. This was in sharp contrast to Warren, who called Trump a “small, insecure money-grubber” in a barnstorming appearance with Clinton in May.
