We live in an increasingly partisan nation. You’ve probably heard it before: people are more likely than ever to vote only one party, the ideological gap is ever-widening and our elected officials just can’t work together anymore. In 2013, Congress was so incapable of agreeing on a budget that they actually let the government shutdown.
People of the opposite party aren’t just people with different strategies to reach the same goal; they’re fascists who want to destroy the country. If you’re a Democrat, Republicans are violent, racist, poor people-hating homophobes who want to kill every person of color using their 2nd amendment protected AK-47s. If you’re a Republican, Democrats are elitist communists who want to destroy the constitution and country by creating a nanny state filled with terrorists and welfare queens.
If you’re a moderate independent, you want to hang your head and sigh. That is, you wanted to hang your head and sigh, right up until the announcement of Tim Kaine as Hillary’s VP.
Tim Kaine was elected as the Democrat governor of Virginia, a purple Southern state. He managed to have a successful and productive term despite a Republican-controlled state legislature and a national financial crisis. In fact, the non-partisan Pew Center named Virginia one of only three states to earn the highest grade in terms of management during the crisis. As governor, he championed legislation to protect the environment, improve education, and improve health care. As senator, he was a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” and he gave a speech on immigration in Spanish on the Senate floor, the first time a non-English speech was ever delivered on the Senate floor.
Of course, the more liberal members of the party aren’t thrilled. They would have preferred Warren, or Sanders, or the reanimated corpse of Karl Marx. There are a number of reasons why they aren’t so excited. For one thing, they’re more likely to see his bipartisanship as a betrayal of liberal values than as a necessary compromise to help the citizens who elected him. For another, he’s a supporter of free trade, and if they’re one thing Donald Trump and ultra-liberals can agree on, it’s that they don’t want your dirty Mexican goods.
And although I personally am excited, I don’t want to oversell it either. Tim Kaine is a great moderate pick, and I do believe he’s the best person on either ticket, but a VP can only do so much. Partisanship still thrives and threatens our government’s ability to function. No single move or politician can fix that.
Nonetheless, the nomination of Kaine is an important victory for reason and moderation. It is a reminder that moderacy and bipartisanship still exist, and hopefully an impetus for them to grow again in power.
