Kaine: The Man Whose Faith Keeps Him Up at Night

General Francisco Franco in the Royal Palace of El Pardo, lights ablaze long into the night while the rest of Spain sleeps, protected by el Caudillo Invicto, the undefeated leader. Long-serving Prime Minister Felipe González, awake in his office in the Palace of Moncloa, the Spanish prime minister’s official residence, until the early hours of the morning. The legend of the leader forgoing sleep for the good of his people is one that has long endured. On Wednesday, at the Democratic National Convention, the public was reminded that Barack Obama, too, spends sleepless nights toiling away for the American people. Only George W. Bush, who has confirmed that during his presidency he was in bed by 10 p.m., broke with this norm.

The candidate for Hillary Clinton’s vice president, the senator from Virginia, Tim Kaine, also loses sleep over the decisions he has to make. He revealed this in an interview with Alberto Avendaño, executive editor of El Tiempo Latino, a Spanish language newspaper owned by The Washington Post. “Kaine is genuine and admits that he has spent sleepless nights agonizing over the decisions that he has had to make,” states Avendaño, who has interviewed the senator on various occasions.* Said decisions have been far from simple: He was governor of Virginia during the financial crisis of 2008, when the U.S. economy collapsed, and his toughest moment came in 2007 when, on an official visit to Japan, he received a call informing him that a gunman had killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University before turning the gun on himself.

That Kaine speaks Spanish could prove key for Hillary Clinton. “When I met him he insisted on speaking Spanish from the first moment,”* explains Ángel Cabrera, president of George Mason University, a public research university in Virginia.

Conversely, it may simply not be enough. The ability to speak the language of Cervantes on its own guarantees nothing. A section of the young Latinos who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries have been entirely unimpressed with the choice of Kaine. What this group of voters wants — voters who are very much Democrats but have not yet accepted Clinton — is a serious compromise on immigration reform, in particular for those who arrived in the country as minors, accompanied by their parents, and who are still considered illegal immigrants, thus running the risk of deportation. They simply want that to change; they do not care if you address them in Spanish or English; in fact, the latter may even be preferable given that the majority speaks English much better than Spanish.

Another thing that keeps Kaine up at night is his faith. He personally opposes abortion, but he is a Democrat in a party that will not give an inch on the issue. The Weekly Standard, a conservative newspaper, albeit one hostile to Donald Trump, has shed light on Kaine’s “contortions” over the issues of abortion and black rights.

Kaine’s political hero is his father-in-law, A. Linwood Holton Jr., Republican governor of Virginia from 1970 to 1974. At a time when the whites of southern states like Virginia were changing neighborhoods so that their children didn’t have to share classrooms with blacks, Holton personally took his daughters to a historically all black public high school. A photograph of the governor walking his children to the school, printed in The New York Times, gained notoriety at the national level — shedding light on the issue of segregated schools — but ultimately ended Holton’s political career.

Capitalizing on all of this is going to be a real challenge for Kaine – a man who is liked by Americans but is a complete unknown. From this point until the election on Nov. 8, Kaine will have little to decide; but, he will have a schedule so busy that it, too, will keep him up at night.

*Editor's Note: Although this quote is accurately translated, it could not be independently verified.