The Upper Cut: The Mainstream Media Isn’t Reporting This

There’s an important fact that the liberal mainstream media hasn’t been reporting about presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s choice of Sen. Tim Kaine as running mate — and not only because Clinton chose to make her announcement on a Friday evening, where news stories go to die.

Her choice of Kaine puzzled many. Kaine is generally regarded as a centrist — at least in comparison to someone like Sen. Bernie Sanders — who personally dislikes abortion and favors trade, but Clinton has the centrist Democrat vote solidly on her side. (Or at least as solidly as any of her support has been).

While Kaine is arguably a liberal in his home state of Virginia (in its defense of him, that’s exactly what The Washington Post claimed), that’s not the same as being a liberal from, say, Massachusetts or Vermont. Liberalism in the Northeast is a whole different animal from anything coming out of any state south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Political pundits expected Clinton to choose someone like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to help Clinton shore up her credentials with the left and pick up as many former Sanders supporters as possible. That, obviously, didn’t happen. The question is why.

And the answer to that question — which essentially no one in the mainstream media has bothered to ask — may reveal that Hillary Clinton is more worried about November’s general election than she would want anyone to guess. A lot more worried.

To determine why Clinton choose Kaine, we have to ask ourselves something the mainstream media has largely ignored, i.e., what he brings to the ticket. What Clinton weaknesses does Kaine mitigate with his strengths?

It’s certainly not the issue of trade. Leftists have hammered Clinton for calling the Trans-Pacific Partnership the “gold standard” for such agreements, but Kaine brings no help here. He was one of 13 Democrats to vote in favor of granting President Barack Obama fast-track authority to approve the deal.

According to CBS, Kaine reversed his position on TPP soon after being chosen as Clinton’s running mate, so he apparently isn’t going to bring much to the table to offset Clinton’s reputation as being a political opportunist, either.

Clinton once supported the Keystone pipeline, but Kaine has favored increased offshore oil drilling, so he’s little help on energy or environmentalism. As a former civil rights attorney, he brings a strong background in social justice, but that hasn’t been an issue with which the left has been at odds with the presumed Democrat nominee. He’s also strong on gun control; but so is Clinton.

So what was Clinton thinking about when she chose Tim Kaine as her running mate?

Could it have been Virginia’s 13 electoral votes?

If so — and it’s hard to see what else she might have been trying to achieve with her pick — it’s strong evidence that Hillary Clinton is terrified about her prospects in November against Republican nominee Donald Trump. Virginia should not by most reckonings be considered any sort of battleground state, but that’s apparently how Clinton has chosen to treat it.

And the mainstream media has essentially ignored the implications of her choice on Hillary Clinton’s general election thinking — not that that’s any surprise.

Sure, Virginia used to be considered a battleground state, but its demographics have changed considerably in recent years. Virginia does not register voters by political party, but looking at the last two presidential elections gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect this year.

In 2008, Obama beat Sen. John McCain with a comfortable margin of 53-46 percent in the general election. In 2012, Obama bested former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney 51-47. That was much closer, obviously — the fourth closest in the nation, in fact, according to The Washington Post.

But Florida, Ohio and North Carolina were all closer, and all three have more electoral votes than Virginia. So wouldn’t it have made more sense to choose someone reliably leftist from one of those states?

Or does she already think those states are lost causes?

According to the latest poll, Virginia is a tie — and that poll was conducted before Trump’s post-convention bounce. Nor was it slanted to the right — 60 percent of respondents favored increased gun control in the same poll. That’s got to be worrisome to the woman who expected to waltz back into the White House essentially unopposed.

Remember, too, that Democrats — and an awful lot of Republicans, for that matter — have been claiming for over a year that there was no way that Donald Trump could possibly win a general election, particularly not against the vaunted Clinton political machine. (Of course, most of those same people also said that Trump couldn’t win the Republican nomination in the first place.)

Granted, one could try to make the same argument about Trump’s choice of Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana. Does that choice indicate Trump’s fear of losing that solid red state?

To ask that question, however, is to demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of Donald Trump. He doesn’t make political calculations the way career establishment figures — like Hillary Clinton — do. Especially when it comes to people, he by all accounts goes mostly with his gut.

Trump has gotten as far as he has in this election by being Donald Trump. Had McCain or Romney selected the Indiana governor as running mate, it might have been cause for concern. Not so with this candidate.

According to Hillary Clinton’s own rhetoric, she should have nothing to fear in Virginia. She should win the state handily against a man who she has described as “temperamentally unfit” for the presidency and whose ideas she once called “dangerously incoherent.”

But actions speak louder than words. And Clinton’s action in selecting Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate shows that Clinton is much more concerned about winning even comfortably Democratic states like Virginia in November than she or her allies in the mainstream media would want us to think.

I was once a Trump skeptic myself. To be honest, I still am regarding some issues. But I have to admit that I agree with Hillary Clinton about this.

She’s right to be worried about November.  What has Tim Kaine achieved – he is just a typical lawyer and a former missionary?  We need a business man not another lawyer.  Our country is in trouble due to all of the lawyers, doctors, professors,, and one Indian Chief called Pocahontas in our government who know nothing about running a country.

kommonsentsjane