My friend Steve Toler (alias Mosbygrey) posed a question I could not answer: Where’s Tim Kaine’s biography? He couldn’t find it anywhere online. The nearest thing that exists on the official Tim Kaine For Governor website is a seven-paragraph page snapshot, “Tim’s Story,” and an autobiographical piece about Kaine’s mission work in Honduras, entitled, “Finding My Mission in Life,” that didn’t come close to answering Steve’s questions.
Those two pages reveal only the sparsest of details: Kaine grew up in Kansas City, son of a small businessman who ran a metal shop. He went to the University of Missouri and then to Harvard Law School, including a year off to work with Catholic missionaries in Honduras. But how did he come to Richmond? When and where did he meet his wife Anne, the daughter of former Gov. Linwood Holton? And how long has he entertained political ambitions?
Steve, a die-hard Republican and unreconstructed Virginian, thinks he sniffs the odeur of old wool carpet — as in carpetbagger — about Kaine. Did Kaine meet Anne outside Virginia and then move here to set up a law practice, possibly with an eye to getting in politics? (In that scenario, it wouldn’t hurt to be married to the daughter of a former governor.) Or did he move to Virginia, where he met and married Anne Holton? (Seemingly less calculated.) In either case, how long after he moved to Richmond did he get involved in politics?
Personally, I don’t have anything against outsiders moving to Virginia, considering the fact that I’m a quasi-outsider, having spent most of my childhood growing up across the Potomac in the District of Columbia, with a few years and summers spent in Norfolk/Virginia Beach. And I’m not normally thrilled about bringing candidates’ family into a political discussion. But Jerry Kilgore’s mama and her Scott County courthouse connections appears to be a legitimate topic, so I suppose Tim Kaine’s relationship to a former Virginia governor should be, too.
Although I disagree with Kaine on a number of issues (most especially his dogged support for the unneeded 2004 tax hike), he strikes me as genuinely sincere and idealistic. But I may be wrong: I really don’t know that much about him. Could Steve’s hunch be right? Is there a streak of political opportunism in Kaine? What do we know about his motives for moving to Virginia?
