Tim Kaine is willing to admit that he would not be the most thrilling selection as running mate for Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket.
“I am boring,” the Virginia senator said Sunday morning during an interview on “Meet the Press.” “But boring is the fastest growing demographic in this country.”
And it also could signal to the presumptive nominee that he wouldn’t upstage her.
Kaine, the former governor of Virginia and head of the Democratic National Committee, is said to be among the top candidates for Clinton to consider as a vice president. Yet some on the Left have said that Kaine would be a safe pick, not one to please the liberal wing of the Democratic base.
“Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd pressed Kaine on two issues on which Kaine has parted ways with liberals in the party: guns and abortion.
Kaine said that he would probably vote for an “assault rifle” ban, as some Democrats have sought, but that such a regulation would be ineffective because “gun manufacturers just make one adjustment or two” and are able to get around the rule. Instead, he said, he would favor restrictions on the sizes of magazines and ammunition sales.
When it comes to abortion policy, Kaine said, “Personally I’m opposed to abortion, and personally I’m opposed to the death penalty.”
But matters of “intimacy” and reproduction belong in the “personal realm,” he added, and the government should not be involved. He declined to say whether he favored any regulations on abortion. “You’ve got to let people make their own moral choices,” he said.
