Video: In Wide-Ranging Conversation, Sen. Tim Kaine Talks About Dems’ “Energy and Unity” Behind Kamala Harris, Trump Having “good reason to be” Nervous, Virginia Being a 4 or 5-Point State, R’s “not going to be able to help themselves” in Launching Racist/Sexist Attacks, etc.

See below for video and a transcript (highlights in bold) from yesterday’s fascinating interview by Jonathan Capehart of Sen. Tim Kaine on C-SPAN.

• “[President Joe Biden’s speech announcing he wasn’t going to run for reelection] was…very emotional…Biden did what very few have done. Washington, Polk, Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ are the only presidents who could have run again, but chose a different path. They thought the nation needed something different. And that is extremely hard to do. Joe Biden has done a great job – senator, vice president, president. It’s the most powerful position in the world. He has accomplishments that he can be proud of. He clearly wants to keep going. But to say the time is right to pass the torch, it was an incredible act of patriotism and humility, and it was very moving.”
• “…the degree of angst between June 27 and the decision last Sunday –  I would walk into room after room, people very nervous, worried, usually divided about what they thought should happen. And then I was in Hampton Roads doing campaign events with Congressman Bobby Scott on Sunday when the news broke, and what you saw was a momentum toward both energy and unity. We had unity before the debate, but we were low on energy…After the debate, we lacked energy and unity, and we need both to win. But what we saw when the announcement hit Sunday and Joe Biden put his strong support behind his Vice President is this energy and unity starting to come together. So you need energy and unity to win. We were lacking. Now we see a credible path forward to having that energy and unity. But we have to — you know, we have to harvest it. And look, I’ve been part of two history-making campaigns. I was on the inside of the Obama ’08 campaign from October ’06. It was a few people from illinois and me, and it was extremely hard. We were successful, but it was extremely hard. And then I was on the ticket with Hillary and we failed. Greatest success in my life, greatest failure of my life, both were history-making campaigns. It’s hard to make history. And so the energy and unity is great, but we should not be at all, you know, kind of rose-colored glasses about how hard this is going to be.”
• “I think in the Senate [Kamala Harris] wasn’t [underestimated]. I mean, I worked with Kamala in the Senate, particularly on maternal mortality issues…I know how much my colleague Mark Warner valued her work on the Intel Committee, and I know how much Dick Durbin valued her work on Judiciary. So I don’t think she was underestimated, but then, you know, you kind of fall into the VP cul de sac. [laughter] I mean, you get to be Vice President, and I used to say to Mark Warner when I was his Lieutenant Governor, there’s only one way I know I can make news, disagree with you on something. [laughter] Other than that, it’s kind of a tough job, and so it ends up maybe taking some air out of the balloon. But I think with Kamala, what you saw is — and I don’t think the White House really used Kamala that well the first two and half years. I don’t think they realized, hey, we got a rock star talent here, we should use her more. But once Dobbs was decided, Kamala was so powerful in speaking about the need for our country to be a place where people make their own reproductive decisions, that the White House, it was like, they kind of woke up and like, wait a minute, she is really, really good. And you can just see since June of 2022, I guess it was, her profile is really elevated, and that actually has made her even better. So that now with the main klieg lights on in this very tough challenge ahead of her, you see her being tough, but tough with a smile on her face, tough but funny, talking about serious stuff but not taking herself too seriously. I think she’s just kind of got the skill set, and in the last few years in particular it’s really been well honed.”
• “I think the…prosecutor vs. felon is just a story that writes itself. So obviously, that is such a powerful story. And that’s — you’re going to hear that line a lot. But I think the one that is even the more powerful one is ‘yesterday vs. tomorrow’. Donald Trump is yesterday’s chaos. Why would we go back to it? And Kamala Harris — plus she’s going to pick a great VP, I don’t know who, but she’ll pick a great one. That’s today and tomorrow. And in any race, if you can make it about yesterday versus today and tomorrow, then you framed the race the right way and today and tomorrow is going to win in my expectation. And I think that that’s why i’m seeing this huge upsurge of energy. What we’re seeing around Virginia is volunteers are flooding in. Everybody suddenly wants convention tickets when nobody wanted to go... The energy, the small dollar donors, that’s all picking up. And I think that’s the yesterday-tomorrow frame. We were really wondering about youth energy, you know, and I was worrying about it in my race. And we do well when young people really participate, we don’t do well when they don’t. We’re seeing that pick up in a very dramatic way. Now, the only problem for a 66-year-old is it involves a whole lot of cultural references I don’t get. But that’s fine.”
• “Kamala has an unrealized upside. You know, we’ve not been promoting Kamala as our nominee for a year. So she is a week into being our nominee. And she has an upside. She’s not known as well as Joe Biden and Donald Trump were known. And so that means the R’s are going to be saying wacky stuff about her and trying to bring her down. But she has an unrealized upside, and then she’s going to add a VP that’s also going to bring an upside — a critical state, a critical skill set, an interesting bio. So there’s a big upside still that we can harvest. And so the most important thing for Kamala, but really all of us, you know the Dem candidates and Dem officials, is tell the story and boost the upside of both Kamala and her running mate. And I think that she starts as lesser known but kind of dead heat, which is where the Biden race was before he pulled out. In Virginia, it had gone from him up by kind of mid-single digits to just dead even in both private and public polling. But I think that’s a good place for her to start. But she’s got an upside that’s not yet been realized. And that’s what she and her team, really all of us, have to [do].”
• “You know, you can expect that attack [that Kamala Harris is too liberal], and you could expect it if she was, you know, the least liberal Democrat on that survey. That’s just the stock-in-trade attack. I think the way that Kamala deals with that is ok, well, what are issues you care about? I mean, do you want lower-cost prescription drugs? We’ve delivered them. What is liberal about that? I think that’s common sense. How about a GDP rate that just is knocking out of the park? How about the best economic recovery of any nation in the world post-Covid? How about we’re building again…manufacturing again? The one piece of advice that I would have for the campaign is Joe Biden did a great job at the State of the Union. And the campaign had kind of tracked that theme of freedom and democracy, really important themes – freedom, reproductive freedom, voting rights, democracy at home, democracy abroad. But the economy isn’t in that theme, and the R’s are going to talk about inflation a lot. And so Kamala has such a great economic record to run on with Joe Biden, and what we’ve done as Democrats in Congress, that I think a way to puncture the label is what’s liberal about lower-cost prescription drugs? You know, what’s liberal about we’re building again and infrastructure? And I think she can lean into the economic successes that people are feeling in every part of the Commonwealth and country.”
• “[Racist/sexist attacks on Kamala Harris are] going to backfire big time. But look, when your leaders have to write a letter to House members telling them not to say racist and sexist things — [laughter] you know, important safety tip. You know, they’re not going to be able to help themselves. I don’t have a PhD in misogyny because i’m a man, but I got a master’s degree in misogyny being on the ticket with Hillary. And watching the degree of misogyny, from outright misogyny, memes and things that were horrible, to the “lock her up” stuff, to Comey basically following a set of rules with respect to Trump, you don’t talk about a pending investigation, you don’t inject controversy into the closing phase of a campaign, but then violating that set of rules with respect to Hillary – double standard. And so that’s a real thing. And it’s not like anybody’s waved a magic wand and made it disappear since 2016. I think the challenge though for those kinds of attacks is those attacks work with people who were not Kamala voters…but I think they can really energize Democrats and anger Independents. And so, I think the Rs will…keep going there. I think it will energize Democrats and anger Independents.”
• “I was in a back room at a marina surrounded by like the 20-gallon water jugs they put into the water dispensers. I was doing an event with Jack Reed in Rhode Island. They said you will get a call in a few minutes from Hillary and it will probably be good news. This was a Friday, they escorted me into the back room of the marina, very pedestrian surroundings but a memorable moment. She said i would like you to be my running mate. And I started to say yes, and she said don’t say anything until I tell you why. So I shut up. She said there are better political picks than you, but you’ve been a mayor and governor and you are a senator on the armed forces committee, and if something were to happen to me you would be a good president. Putting duty and the job over the politics, which is very Hillary.”
• “i didn’t mention the deciding factor, because it goes without saying, Hillary didn’t need to say it to me, you have to have a chemistry. So the candidates you see mentioned, that the Harris team is vetting, all have interesting bios. They all bring something to the table politically – some would put electoral votes in play…they all have some powerful qualities. And Kamala would be looking at those qualities and looking at some polling in trying to decide who is best. But at the end of the day, it is a relationship with a person that you have to be able to count on them being brutally honest with you, and completely candid in a closed room and then completely supportive outside the closed room. And that is a unique relationship. You’re trying to pick somebody that will help you be better at the job by being candid with you, who has some expertise to really give you meaningful advice, but then you can completely count on to be loyal outside of the room. And that is a chemistry. So I think what Kamala will see is, she will have a lot of people who get over the hurdles. And then it will be, here are folks that got over all the high hurdles, now from a chemistry standpoint, what’s going to be the best match?”
• “On the [VP] pool, what two weeks means is there are seven or eight people. In Obama ’08, Clinton 2016, I was vetted both times, it was 30 people, then 20, then 10, then 5, 3, 2, 1. The short timeframe does not mean you sacrifice in-depth analysis, it’s just you have to have a much smaller field to do this by August 7. She’s got a lot of good directions to go… I think we have a big talent pool…I will say of all of those people, I serve with [Mark] Kelly on the Armed Services Committee and I know he and Gabby socially and I’m very very close to them. And I think his track record before he was a Senator, his work with Gabby on gun violence — I could see Mark Kelly standing on a stage and saying, ‘my wife’s really been affected by gun violence and President Trump’s has too, and the difference between us is you guys think the solution is more automatic weapons and we think the solution is more common sense’. I could see him delivering a line like that and it working. [applause] But look – Josh Shapiro, battleground state, that might be the holy grail of the battleground states and a contested senate race. Kelly’s got a contested senate race, battleground state. Cooper, North Carolina is in play, it went for Obama in ’08, hasn’t gone since, but for a variety of reasons, including state politics, North Carolina’s in play and that would be a good one and Cooper could help there and elsewhere.  Andy Beshear, a real Appalachian… [laughter]
• “I don’t think Virginia is a 10-point Democratic state. When Barack won in ’08, McCain didn’t compete there…Barack won by 6 [points] but it was artificially high because it wasn’t a real competition. Romney DID make a play for Virginia in 2012 and it was 4 [points]. Hillary and I, it was six [points], but I probably added two [points], so it’s probably four [points]. Biden and Harris won it by 10 [points] but that was post-Covid…a repudiation of Trumpism in the Covid era. But I don’t think Virginia is a 10-point state, I don’t think it’s a six-point state, I think it’s a four or five-point state. So I don’t foresee a Harris win at 10 [points]. But I would see a Harris win that we could get, I believe with the energy we can and we will, that will be kind of where the four or five [point] range that I think would be a natural place where Virginia is right now.”
• “First, in my own race, my opponent backed out of the debate last week, I just have to say something about my own race. [laughter] [applause] So Rs backing out of debates is kind of a stock-in-trade. And obviously, Ttrump, there was one he didn’t do in 2020. Look – you can run but you can’t hide. You can run but you can’t hide. He is nervous and he has good reason to be.”
• “How is this moment going to be analyzed? And maybe in particular I want to think about how young people see the world right now. A lot of young people are very disillusioned. The argument that democracy’s on the line, turns out it doesn’t work that well with young people because you have to have been illusioned before you can be disillusioned. And young people have gone through Covid and they’ve gone through strife globally, and they’ve seen economic challenges…missing your senior year in high school, not playing football, not going to the prom, having to do virtual learning. So I think a lot of young people look at adults and feel like you guys kind of messed the world up. But I felt – Kennedy was killed when I was five, then I go out at 10 and pick up the paper on the driveway…and Martin Luther King’s been assassinated, and then June of ’68 Bobby’s been assassinated. And by the time I’m 16, Nixon resigns as president. My formation as a young person was chaos – Vietnam War,  people getting firehosed for doing civil rights marches. The way I viewed the world coming up was it was chaotic. But I saw something else – I saw young people marching against the war and the war coming to an end… I saw young people playing a critical role in convincing LBJ not to run again, young people getting the voting age changed from 21 to 18 and civil rights marchers helping us achieve civil rights victories. So what I learned at that moment and I kind of hope young people feel this too – if you feel like adults have messed up the world, there is evidence to support your proposition. But the lesson of that generation was, what did young people do? They engaged and they made change, they made positive change. When young people engage, I have complete confidence that things are going to go well. And when young people don’t engage — I mean Brexit, the Brexit vote, youth turnout was really low, young people overwhelmingly were against Brexit but the turnout was low. And so they end up getting a society that they didn’t want, and it has been in my view a real disaster for the U.K…a horrible thing, young people didn’t engage. But the lesson as I look back at this picture and I wrote about it –  it was a chaotic time and I imagine young people feel that today – but the lesson of that era is when young people engage, things get better, and I still believe that’s true.”