Last night Tim Kaine and his wife sat in the row behind my wife and me at the Westhampton Theater in Richmond, attending a showing of “The Queen.”
The Governor dressed like an ordinary bloke: He wore a tieless, button-down shirt and a leather jacket. That’s one of his more appealing traits. He may be the Governor, but a year on the job doesn’t seem to have changed him. He hasn’t grown impressed with himself — he does the same things he did as Lt. Governor, mayor and private citizen. Over recent years, I’ve seen him pop into a wine store in the Fan, walking alone down the sidewalk in downtown Richmond, and chowing down on hamburgers with the wife and kids at the River City Diner in Shockoe Bottom.
The two central characters in “The Queen” are Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Tony Blair, a moderate liberal politician in much the same philosophical mold as Gov. Kaine. When the movie was over and the lights came on, I was tempted to ask the Governor his impression of how Blair was portrayed. But I decided not to: The movie had opened with Princess Diana fleeing the torments of the paparazzi and driving to her death. Even public figures deserve their privacy. Indeed, respecting the rights of people, especially prominent people, to their privacy is a sign of civilized behavior — a trait that the Queen found to her dismay that the British people no longer possessed.
But Virginians are still civilized and respectful of the rights of others. So, I left the Governor in peace. I guess I’ll have to wait until the next blogger conference to ask him what he thought of Tony Blair.
