Tim Kaine was, for a time, snared in the Obama administration’s decision to require [1] Catholic and other church-sponsored hospitals and charities to cover family planning services. He may have quibbled his way out of that one (but not entirely, as we’ll see in a bit), but there is one issue on which Kaine is unshakeable: his disdain for guns.
The most recent evidence of that came in a fundraising email from the Kaine campaign titled “One Gun.” In this pitch, Kaine’s copywriters took to the barricades to decry the likely repeal of the state’s one gun a month law:
The Wilder administration’s one handgun per month law helped to end Virginia’s reputation as a gun-running state, while striking an appropriate balance between 2nd amendment rights and public safety.
Yesterday, the General Assembly passed legislation repealing one handgun per month — and George Allen and Bob Marshall have already voiced their support for putting it into law.
I hope you’ll join me in urging Governor McDonnell to veto this legislation and urge all of Virginia’s Republican leaders in Richmond to renew their commitment to a focus on jobs and the economy. Sign our petition now.
Wasting time repealing successful legislation that has been on the books since 1993 only reinforces the partisan politics that too often play a role in Congress and state legislatures across the country.
It’s not a bad pitch in general and it ought to play quite well with his list. And while it lacks the vividness of Fightin’ Joe Morrissey’s legions of “crack heads [2]” descending upon the commonwealth to buy truckloads of guns with fake IDs, it gets the point across.
And it’s a point Kaine has been making for a long time. Back in his days as a member of Richmond’s city council, Kaine exercised his dislike for weapons of all sorts by using money from his PAYGO account [3] to send protestors to the “Million Mom March.” As I noted at the time:
As a private citizen and even as a council member, Tim Kaine had every right to help people get to the event. He did not have the right, however, to use taxpayer funds to do so. Until the issue came out in the press, Kaine seems to have entertained no intention of telling any one he used taxpayer funds to help send people to what I consider to have been a political rally. This shows poor judgment.
Of course after the payment came to light, Kaine repaid the money into his PAYGO account. He raised it privately — exactly what he should have done in the first place.
Which is what he’s doing today. And isn’t it interesting to see the swing at Bob Marshall, who only recently threw his hat into the GOP nomination ring? That’s what’s otherwise known as a dog whistle, and I’m sure Kaine’s list responds to Marshall’s name like a prize hunting dog.
But back to the email’s text for a moment…
The lede paragraph also contains these nuggets:
Instead of focusing on jobs and the economy, they have a cadre of partisan social issues on their agenda — from the personhood amendment to an aggressive voter identification law…
One could assume from this that Kaine is against the Personhood amendment [4], which may not come as a surprise. But does stir the pot a bit more for those who are strongly pro-life, and may have concerns about Kaine’s stance [5] on the matter.
He’s not entirely out of the woods yet.