Senator Tim Kaine:

This Land Is Our Land

Editor’s note: This interview took place nine days before the brutal murder of George Floyd.

by Charles McGuigan 05.2020

Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a man of the people, a man of faith and compassion who seeks the North Star of an ever more perfect Union even during this global pandemic and these divisive times, is good enough to take time out of a very busy schedule to talk with me a few weeks ago from his front porch in the Northside. He has just returned from DC, and long days and nights in the US Capitol.

Eight hours before President Obama would deliver a moving commencement speech to every 2020 graduate in America, Tim mentions a program he started called Everybody’s a Graduation Speaker. “I have been thinking about the class of 2020 high schoolers and college kids,” he tells me. “And they’re cheated a little bit, they don’t get the real graduation experience or the prom experience . . . so I decided to do something fun.”

His Senate office put out a call to graduating seniors across the Commonwealth.  “We said, if you want to be the graduation speaker Video yourself giving a ten-minute graduation speech and email it to my office,” says Tim. “And we’ve gotten submissions from all around Virginia. Starting on Monday May 18 we’re going to start posting one a day of these graduation speeches . . . on our Senate webpage and put them out for all Virginians.”

It is sunny, bright, the air thick with the sweet smell of just-bloomed magnolias, and the twittering of birds. I’m standing fifteen feet from the front stoop of a house on a tree-lined street in Ginter Park. Sitting up on the top step, dressed in faded blue jeans and a maroon knit shirt, Senator Tim talks about the state house in Michigan, which is closed today because of threats made against Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

“The archetypal picture recently is the one of the people in the Michigan capitol yelling in the faces of State Police,” he says. “And you think about somebody with no mask on who potentially has coronavirus intentionally trying to infect somebody by standing six inches away and yelling in their face. I’m outraged when I see those pictures.”

When I ask if he’s ever seen anything like this before, he reminds me that he spent seventeen years as a civil rights lawyer before going into politics. “I think the election of a President Obama says something very true about who America is, but the election of a President Trump says something very true about who America is,” he says. “I don’t think these folks are the majority, but if you don’t understand that there are some hate currents that are in this country, than you don’t really understand the full nature of who we are.”

About once a week, Tim reviews the comments on his social media page. “You have to read the comments to see the degree of hatred and bigotry and anger that many people have, because if you don’t understand that, you don’t fully understand who this country is,” he says. “Again, I don’t think it’ a majority. You see more love and friendship and companionship than you see that, but you can’t kid yourself that it doesn’t exist. There is a lot of hatred and a lot of bigotry and a lot of anti-Semitism. So it’s a scary moment we’re living in, but I tend to view it as not the creation of something, but the revelation of something that’s been there all along. Virginia has more scar tissue than anybody else when it comes to this issue.”

Asked if he has faith in the preservation of the Republic, Tim nods. “I have faith for two reasons; one would be a theological reason, and then the other would be a historical reason,” he says.

After summarizing the story of Job from the Old Testament, Tim considers its true meaning. “I think we sometimes go through things because we’re being tested,” he says. “And the answer from the Book of Job is, it wasn’t because you’re bad, it wasn’t because the universe is pointless. This is a test. Will you hold to your principals and your faith even while tested, and because he (Job) does, what was lost to him was restored.”

Then Tim turns to the other reason, the one grounded in historic fact.

“I think if you look at American history, you can basically say the whole history is explained by Jefferson stating that our key value is the equality principle, and that was reaffirmed by Lincoln at Gettysburg, so both the founder of the modern Democratic Party and the founder of the modern Republican Party said this is the key principal,” Tim says. “But if you look at that as a North Star, what you see is we advance and then we retract, we declare our independence with high-minded ideals, but then we’re burdened by a Constitution that enshrines slavery. And then we go through the bloody expiation of sin that was the Civil War, and we make advances with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but then Reconstruction immediately is ended, and now we’re into Jim Crow. We do Brown versus Board, but then massive resistance. We retract, but we don’t go as far back as before we stepped forward. We go back and start pushing again. “

Tim invites me to consider Virginia’s own checkered past.

“Look at what’s happened in Virginia since I was born in 1958,” he says. Of that year 1958, he mentions massive resistance and segregation, how women were barred from attending University of Virginia among other state colleges, how only one out of a hundred Virginians was foreign-born.

“And guess what?” says Tim. “We were also poor, we were at the bottom quarter per capita income.”

But with progress, things changed.  These days, one out of every eight or nine Virginians is foreign-born. “We’re in the top quarter per capita income,“ he says. “The only (other) state that’s moved bottom quarter to top quarter in per capita income since 1958 with us is North Dakota. They discovered oil. We discovered that if you put artificial barriers between people, you’re not going to be as successful as you would be otherwise. “

We then turn to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the federal response to this global crisis.  “Anthony Fauci is an expert,” Tim says. “And we’ve got other experts who are doing really good work in the federal government. The Trump team has some really sharp people.”

Having said that, Tim adds, “I think the Trump administration has horribly mishandled this because there’s no conceivable reason why the United States, which had our first case the same day that South Korea did, now have eighty plus thousand deaths, and South Korea should have two hundred and fifty. By early March we were still the same, our unemployment rates were still the same. Now South Korea’s unemployment rate is at four percent, and ours is at fifteen percent. They pursued a strategy that was very different than the strategy that was pursued in this country.”

He recalls those early, critical weeks, when every minute counted in containing a virus that spread like pollen in Richmond springtime. “For six to eight weeks,” says Tim. “We had a commander in chief/president saying, ‘It’s not a problem. It will go away. Democrats and the media are blowing it out of proportion. We’ve got five case, they’ll be gone by the end of month. It will get better when the weather gets warm. You could inject disinfectant.’ He downplayed the risk, and then preached a lot of nonsense about it. If you’ve got good advice coming from Dr. Fauci, but then the president, who has a much louder microphone, countering it, then you’re going to find our response isn’t as good.”

Tim mentions a particularly bizarre occurrence that recently emanated from the White House.

“I think it was three Thursdays ago,” he says. “President Trump did a press conference and he rolled out with his team the three phases to reopen our economy.”

Tim and the rest of Virginia’s federal delegation were on a conference call with Governor Ralph Northam. “So you were on the call with the president when he was announcing it, what do you think?” Tim asked the governor.

“Science-based, sound, we’re going to follow it,” Governor Northam said.

Tim was pleasantly surprised that the federal guidelines were in keeping with a strategy endorsed by scientific experts and a governor who is also a doctor.

But then of course the tweeting began, early the very next morning.

“President Trump is tweeting out ‘Liberate Virginia, liberate Michigan, liberate Wisconsin,’” says Tim. “Governors are trying to apply the guidelines that he had given less than twelve hours before. And President Trump is trying to foment insurgency in the midst of a global pandemic. It’s shocking. You cannot look any Virginian or American in the face with a death toll now north of eighty thousand and climbing, and say it had to be this way. Because the experience of other nations in the world show, no, to the contrary. We have forty-five times the death rate in South Korea, three times the death rate in Germany, twice that in Canada, dozens of times the death rate in Australia or Japan or Vietnam or New Zealand.”

Congress, according to Tim, has provided the resources needed to combat the pandemic. Between the third of March and the twenty-fifth of April, the legislators passed four major bills, and at the time of this interview, were working on a fifth.

“There are basically five pillars,” says Tim. “Aid to individuals and families. Aid to small businesses. Loans to large businesses. Aid to state and local governments. Aid to hospitals and the broader healthcare network. Those five pillars are what we’re focused on. I’m particularly working on two, hospitals and healthcare network, because I’m on the health committee, and state and local government aid because I’m a former mayor and governor. Senator Warner’s focused on the small business and large business pieces of it because of his roles on the banking and finance committees, so we’re trying to do that.  We can provide the resources and then we can give the platform to the best evidence and the best science. We did that on a bipartisan basis on the health committee this week.”

Tim has been impressed by leadership of our governors—Republican and Democrat alike. “Mike DeWine in Ohio, Larry Hogan in Maryland, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts,” says Tim. “I mean there’s some Republican governors who’ve done great work in this.”

Then Tim gives the current administration credit where credit is due.

“And let me be fair Charles, because I’ve been really critical of the Trump administration,” he says. “It’s also important, if you’re critical, to point out things where they’re doing well. So, they have people like Fauci and others who are sharp. And here’s something that I’ve been pleasantly impressed with. We passed four big pieces of legislation, acting quickly.  I’ll say this about the Trump team in the implementation of what Congress has done, they’ve been really, really good in implementing and then adjusting. I’m very, very praiseworthy of the administration on that.”

He singles out Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. “He’s been the negotiator on the administration’s side,” says Tim. “How do you get the four bills in a row that are virtually unanimous in a divided time? Well the nature of the emergency pulls us together. But you’ve got to have somebody at the White House who you can deal with and trade with and Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin has been their key guy on the bills that we’ve passed, and has done a good job.”

 So the public health management of this has been abysmal, the effort to implement the resources that have been provided, I give the administration high marks on that.

Looking to the future, Tim considers the resiliency of the economy and the American people.  “This is not an economic collapse driven by economic conditions,” he says. “It’s all driven by the pandemic. The economy had a lot of internal weaknesses and challenges, but it also had a lot of strengths in January and February. So what do we do? We’ve got to get over the public health crisis. That will be the single best thing we can do for the economy.  So the health care response is the key, but what we have to do is have a bridge to get people through, and so again, aid to individuals, small businesses, large businesses, state and local governments, hospitals, healthcare sector.”

To hear the full audio story, and watch a special front porch concert featuring Tim Kaine on harmonica and vocals, please visit northofthejames.com