Video: Sen. Tim Kaine Says Not Electing Hillary Clinton President Was the “Biggest Failure in My Life”; Says He Got “doctoral-level education in misogyny and mistreatment of women” in 2016 Campaign

Sen. Tim Kaine spoke not once but twice at the Women’s Summit earlier today – first to the everyone, second in a forum for candidates. See below for video and a few highlights from his remarks, some of which were VERY striking – including:

• “I don’t know that there’s a harder job in public service right now than being a school board member…”
• “There was a school board member in Loudoun who announced that she was not going to run again…I called her and had a chat with her about it. And this was the quote ‘my salary won’t cover a funeral; when I get threats and my kids get threats I really have to assess this’. There’s a tiny group of loud people that claim that they’re a majority, but they’re just a tiny and loud minority and often when they talk about ‘parents’ rights’, what they’re talking about is one parent should be able to veto what everybody else’s parents want.”
• “I had a doctoral-level education in misogyny and mistreatment of women when I was on the ballot with Hillary Clinton in 2016. I’m not dumb…I was a civil rights lawyer for 17 years before I got into politics and I did sexual discrimination cases in the employment sphere, and I knew of course there’s different standards and women are treated differently, but not until I was on the ticket with Hillary and I saw the ‘Lock Her Up’ chants and I saw the gross double standard applied to her, where minor foibles became major and, at the same time as Donald Trump’s you know, mortal and venial sins were being conveniently, you know, forgotten by everybody… I mean I even saw a FBI director who followed two rules – you don’t talk about a controversial matter before the election, you don’t talk about an ongoing investigation. He knew those rules. He followed them with respect to the investigation into Donald Trump and he violated both of them with respect to Hillary Clinton. So from misogyny to subtle double standards, I saw it again and again and again. And I’ve said this once or twice, but not in big audiences, I will always count it as maybe the best achievement I ever have had in my life that I signed on early to help Barack Obama be elected president, and was part of and it was was part of breaking a a discriminatory limit about who could be president of the United States in 2008. But I’ll always count as the biggest failure of my life that I had an opportunity to do the same and help the first woman president be elected and I fell short. That is my biggest regret in life. I had that opportunity to work with Hillary Clinton in the way I had worked with Barack Obama and break that glass ceiling and I fell short. And it took me a long time after 2016 to kind of figure out okay, well, what do I learn from that? What do I do as a result of it? What I decided is amongst all the other things I’m trying to do I really want to try to help empower women candidates.”
• “We got to do so much more in this country. We are now at our  historic peak – 26% of our Congress is women, that’s like the best we’ve ever been folks.  That’s below the global average. If you look at national parliaments around the world, the US is about a hundredth. I mean, the the top nations are in the 40s and 50s and 60 percent…there’s no one-size-fits-all about it, it’s just that we are bad at it. And we’ve got to get better at it.”

• “You want everybody that you talk to to remember the same thing about  who you are and what is your priority and the priorities should link really closely with who you are…”
• “I once got introduced at an event as ‘Tim Kaine is one of 29 people in the history of the United States who have been a mayor, a governor and a senator.’ I was like, that cannot be right. I mean, governors are a dime a dozen. That cannot be right. So I went back to the Senate historian and… a week later she comes back to me, she goes that is right, in the whole history of the United States, only 29 people who’ve been a mayor, a governor, a senator. And…then suddenly it dawned on me, being mayor will kill you. Local government is the toughest…place to serve, in many ways the most satisfying place to serve, because you make this really tangible difference if you’re the sheriff, if you’re the council member…so I particularly just want to say to folks running for local office, school board, supervisor….the Constitutional officers you will make such a big impact on people’s lives in local office.”
•  “I liked them all, but if I had to give up every title I’ve
  ever had, I’d hold on to mayor. Because if I’m good at anything in politics, it’s because I was in local government, and if I hadn’t been mayor, I wouldn’t have been anything else.”
• “I want to just thank all of you for doing this and your families. It’s a sacrifice. And it’s harder to start now than it was when I started in 1994. I’m in my 30th year doing this. I started before internet and blogs. When I started, you could be in public life and still have a private life; everything that you’ve ever done wasn’t available to be twisted and used against you.”
• “I’ll just tell you, especially now, I never would have thought democracy would have been under attack in this country as it is now.  I was a missionary in Honduras in 1980 and 81, it was a military dictatorship…and that was so eye-opening to me. And I realized, wow, a lot of people live under authoritarianism, where the government if they have any rules they can change them at the drop of the hat…But I didn’t think we would see that here. What we’re seeing in this country and in countries around the globe is this advent of the authoritarians…in Honduras it was a military dictatorship, just kind of they grabbed power and they ran everything. What we’re seeing in the world now, including here, is people who get elected by democratic means and then they try to undo the institutions – the independent judiciary, the free press, and squash dissenters and protesters, they try to undo the institutions that are the guard rails for democracy. So if there was ever a time that it was important to put yourself out here and put your name on a ballot and and run that risk of rejection…we’ve got to do this to to unify the pro-democracy forces in this country to defeat authoritarianism.”
• “I welcome any pro-democracy person in the GOP to join us in this, but right now the GOP nationally has been taken over by authoritarians. And that means those of us in the Democratic Party, we’re not just standing up for our party, we’re standing up, we’re protecting this democracy, top to bottom, from city halls to Congress.”