Hillary Clinton announced her vice presidential pick Friday, and though many didn’t seem to know much about Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, most black folks seem OK with her choice. Bernie Sanders’ supporters, however, are fuming over a hacker breach of the Democratic National Convention server, which threatens to disturb the tenuous peace between them and the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Clinton announced Kaine as her running mate via text, a so-called battle-state politician with blue-collar roots. The New York Times reports that in recent days, Bill Clinton had expressed support for Kaine, as did the White House. (Vox reports that Kaine was a top choice for President Barack Obama’s VP pick in 2008.)
Kaine, 58, who is a former governor of Virginia and former mayor of Richmond, currently serves on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. He learned to speak fluent Spanish when he spent a year in Honduras after taking a year off from Harvard Law school, which may bode well for Hispanic voters.
Tim Kaine is also, obviously, a white man.
Many pundits consider Kaine the safe choice. According to the Times, the campaign had become concerned about Clinton’s deficits with white men, a demographic polling exceptionally well with Republican Donald Trump, her opponent in this year’s presidential election.
The folks of color who took to social media after the announcement mostly had positive things to say about Kaine, but many did not know much about him.
In other news that may not bode well for Hillary Clinton, a DNC email breach by a hacker identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0 revealed damning emails from the DNC concerning Bernie Sanders, which confirms for his supporters the committee’s partiality during the Democratic primary.
The most damning of the 20,000 emails, leaked from the accounts of seven DNC officials and uploaded to Wikileaks, called Sanders “a Jew” and also exposed DNC staffers appearing to ponder ways to actively undercut him.
CNN reports that in a May 5 email, a DNC employee asked colleagues to “get someone to ask his belief” in God and suggested that it could make a difference in Kentucky and West Virginia. “This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall wrote. Sanders’ name is not mentioned in the note.
The emails also reveal that DNC staff were strategizing to make Clinton the presidential nominee as early as March 2015.
The issue with this is that many Sanders supporters (and Sanders himself) had serious issues with the DNC, charging the committee with bias and saying that it actively worked against the Vermont senator. There has long been bad blood between Sanders and the DNC: Sanders even sued it over a voter-data kerfuffle and campaigned against DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz during her congressional election.
For Hillary Clinton, this could become a real issue, because if Clinton cannot swing already wary Sanders supporters to vote for her, she could very well lose the presidential election in November.
Donald Trump gleefully took to Twitter immediately to exploit the situation:
All of this will make the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, starting Monday, very interesting watching.
Stay tuned to The Root for coverage.