I Promise Not To Make Tim Kaine Puns for 4-8 Years

There looks to me further fuel to the speculation about Tim Kaine. He cancelled a fundraiser in Maryland tomorrow due to a "scheduling problem." And he was in Washington today at a time that Obama, his staff, and his veep selection team were all in the same place.

So, you know, take it or leave it. I personally think that it's a bad choice if you're a progressive, though I'm not as Chicken Little about it as Matt Stoller, who makes a pretty dishonest incomplete (see UPDATE below) argument in rebutting Matt Yglesias, particularly by ignoring most of his argument (that VPs have extremely little impact on the governing philosophy of a President. You could argue that Cheney did, but Bush was pretty much there already).

(UPDATE: I want to be clear that I say "dishonest", which should have been "incomplete," in terms of the argument made and not the author, who is not a dishonest person. I don't typically take personally things said about me on the Internets and I have the same perspective when I write, but I apologize to the author if that didn't transfer.)

However, because Obama has been somewhat inscrutable in what his priorities as a chief executive would be, this decision offers a window into his thought process. And that window, if it's Kaine, opens to a guy who has been a sellout on coal, signed a bill that Mark Warner vetoed repealing the estate tax and then instituted a sales tax increase that would disproportionately affect the poor, and failed to rein in the poisonous partisan atmosphere in Virginia. On the other hand, he's anti-death penalty, was a community organizer and at least campaigned as a pragmatic progressive, though he's lost his way on that according to the locals.

So, if it's him, I'm disappointed, although I didn't really expect my perfect progressive choice to be recognized. FWIW Kaine dismissed the speculation today, but that's to be expected. We'll wait and see.