Yesterday, Sen. Tim Kaine was on the Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi on WAMU and had some interesting things to say. See below for a transcript and highlights:
On a possible government shutdown: “I think it’s very unlikely. We we flirt with shutdowns. Republicans like to use it as a negotiating threat, but I got a bill passed, in early 2019 that guarantees all federal employees receive back pay in the event of any shutdown. And so once there’s a guarantee that we’re gonna be writing a check to all federal employees, why shut government down, lock them out of their office, stop them from serving their fellow Americans? And we haven’t had a shutdown since then even though people have been flirting with it. My prediction is this. We’re gonna get a short term continuing resolution as we usually do through the end of the calendar year, in between election day and, Christmas time, essentially, we will hammer out a an omnibus full year appropriations bill. That’s normally what we do. We extend it into the next year last year because the house was without a speaker for a month. But we will get this thing done by calendar year end, and we won’t shut government down.“
On Joe Biden passing the torch to Kamala Harris: “Even before I saw any polling results, there was an electricity generated by Joe Biden deciding to put the torch of leadership into the next generation’s hands with Vice President Kamala Harris. And I could see an immediate sea change in the amount of energy – and not only the Democratic parts of the state, but my wife who’s from the Appalachian part of Virginia, she and I did an Appalachian swing in August. And even in the really red parts of the state, local Democratic committee chairs were seeing volunteers that they’ve never seen before, energy and enthusiasm that they’ve never seen before. So now the polling is starting to come in. And I’ll tell you, I think there have been three public polls in the last week, but all were done before the debate. And those public polls had Kamala Harris up in Virginia between 6 and 10 points. And an interesting thing about the polls is that the number of undecided voters is already very, very low. So, I’m running my race as if I’m behind. Yes, my polls look good, but I’m working very, very hard. And we do have three fairly competitive congressional district races in Virginia as well. And, obviously, the better that, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do, the better those congressional candidates are gonna do.”
On the Harris vs. Trump debate and the possibility of another one: “Well, you know, I think, there’s no chance that Donald Trump will get on the debate stage again with Kamala Harris because he got absolutely thrashed. And I thought, you know, there were three important themes in the debate, at least three. #1, Kamala’s presentation of her own plans extremely effective. Her focus on the economy, housing costs, child tax credit, focus tax relief on small businesses, that came through loud and clear. So her presentation was very strong. Donald Trump’s presentation was was very, very weak, rambling, disoriented, creating lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio that have already led to bomb threats and buildings in that community, public buildings and schools being shut down yesterday and today. He would not clearly state that he hoped Ukraine would defeat Russia’s illegal invasion. He would not clearly state that he would veto a national abortion ban. When he was asked after many, many years of trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, does he have an alternative, he said he has the concept of a plan, but not even a plan after these years. So I think his presentation was poor. And then the third thing that I’ll notice, Kamala Harris’s nonverbal presentation, when when you saw that split screen during Donald Trump’s presentation, Kamala’s facial expressions and her demeanor were very important because they, without seeming angry or snarky, she conveyed a very obvious sense of incredulity at a number of Donald Trump’s claims. I think what the American public saw in that debate, they wanted to see in Kamala Harris, can she stand up against, you know, leaders around the world who may be bad actors? And they saw her handle Donald Trump in a way that is giving them confidence.”
On advice to Tim Walz debating JD Vance on 10/1: “You know, Tom, I’ll tell you. We looked at the history, when I was doing that debate in 2016, we looked at the history of vice presidential debates, and we concluded that there is only one thing that affects where the vice presidential candidate can affect the outcome. And that one thing is not defending your top of the ticket. Often VP candidates have great performances. Everybody remembers of my age, Lloyd Bentsen’s, you know, line back to Dan Quayle, ‘I knew Jack Kennedy, and you’re no Jack Kennedy.’ But that didn’t affect the outcome, the Bush Quayle ticket won. But if a vice presidential candidate does not vigorously defend the top of the ticket, that is harmful. That was the case, for example, when Joe Lieberman debated Dick Cheney in 2000. He didn’t really vigorously defend the Cheney attacks on Al Gore. So the most important thing to do – and I did this in my debate, folks didn’t like my debate much because it was me trying to keep my opponent, Mike Pence, from opening up new lines of attack on Hillary Clinton. I didn’t focus on myself at all… look, Tim Walz in his own way, he’s a seasoned guy at this, is gonna do very, very well. But the main thing is you gotta have the back of the top of the ticket, and all the indications from watching Tim and Kamala on the trail suggest that he is gonna do that.”
“How does the presidential campaign impact downballot races like your own?”: “You know, Kojo…in particular in Virginia, we’re seeing low numbers of undecideds in the presidential. So I think the Democrats have unity right now, but what you always want to see is energy. And I’ll be blunt. When I was campaigning early in the summer around Virginia before Joe Biden had passed the torch to Kamala, I was seeing unity, but I was seeing low energy. And that’s troubling. You gotta have both unity and energy. Now we are seeing that energy as very, very palpable, and that’ll make a big difference. I think particularly in looking at the Virginia map, the 10th and the 7th districts are open seats, with Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton not running again. We need energy in those districts, and I think Kamala is giving us that energy. The second district in Virginia Beach, Republican Jen Kiggans is the incumbent in that seat in her first term after defeating Elaine Luria, but Missy Cotter Smasal is a talented challenger on the Democratic side, and the increased energy generated by Kamala Harris is gonna be very helpful to her.”
On a question he got from a student in Fauquier County about gun violence: “Tom, you’re you’re right. It was a a student, at a high school in Fauquier, and she asked at a big open forum, she asked the last question…she said, ‘I don’t feel safe going to school. How can you, what what can you tell me about how we can feel safer?’ And I basically said two things. First, at the Virginia level, we’ve gone from a state that was very hostile to gun safety measures to a state whose General Assembly has passed a number [of gun safety measures] in recent years. That doesn’t end the threat of gun violence, but it is helping make Virginia safer. Virginia is one of the safest states in the country now. 20 years ago, that wasn’t the case. At the federal level, we still lag behind. We haven’t done what we need to do. However, in 2022, in the aftermath of tragic shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, we did work together in a bipartisan way to do the first meaningful gun safety legislation since the mid 1990s, making it more difficult for young people to purchase weapons, making it a little bit more straightforward to temporarily disable people from getting guns if they’ve been adjudicated mentally ill and dangerous. It was a modest bill, not a big bill, but we had to beat the NRA and the gun lobby to do it, and we did. That means the floor should be open for us in Congress to do more things similar to what Virginia has done”
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