Based on a comment on the blog, The Field, 1/8/09:
Barack Obama has appointed Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to be the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This wouldn't have happened if former Virginia governor Mark Warner and then Governor Kaine hadn't turned the state from red to blue in recent years (preparing the way for Obama's capturing its electoral votes in '08). This was one of those things that seemed impossible at the outset -- and then inevitable once it was done, given the sudden discovery of demographic change in northern Virginia. But social statistics don't turn themselves into votes, without a political strategy to win those votes.
The strategy was deceptively simple: the Democratic aspirant for governor would stipulate the importance of good social values and campaign doggedly in socially conservative areas of the state, embracing and getting happy with everyone who'd turn out for a rally. Southwest Virginians couldn't believe the amount of time that Warner and Kaine spent down there. Each of them won just enough of that formerly hard-right base to require the Republicans to hold every last northern Virginia moderate suburban taxpayer.
Then the Democratic candidate would campaign heatedly in northern Virginia, emphasizing his pragmatic invest-in-education and invest-in-roads programs. This was catnip to moderate Republican businesspeople and distressed soccer moms who saw the grip on the state capitol held by anti-tax, anti-anything conservatives, who'd let the suburbs' traffic dissolve into gridlock and insufficient school budgets create visible angst at the local level. It didn't hurt that Tim Kaine was married to the daughter of one of Virginia's most beloved Republican governors. Caricatured by the right as a smiling socialist-in-disguise (heard that one before?), Kaine sailed right by those tactics and pulverized the right with pragmatism.
Now if you know Tim Kaine, you know that he comes equipped with a passionate social justice commitment, deepened by his time working with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras (and if you want deep history about that, see the terrific movie, "The Mission", with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro). So this improbable, cherubic-faced, balding, eyebrow-cocking nerdy guy who wants to remake the world followed in the footsteps of his telegenic precedessor Mark Warner, and completed the destruction of the time-tested electoral model for eternal control of Virginia by conservative Republicans. All that Barack Obama had to do in Virginia in '08 was paint by the same numbers.
The Virginia legislature still has a lot of John McCain types from Newport News, and Sarah Palin-loving types from down in Southside. But their comfy political tyranny in Virginia is history. No one should wonder why Barack Obama thinks a lot of Tim Kaine.
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