Hillary Clinton did not bring the Kaine on Friday.
Damn near every political-news outlet’s anonymous sources had whispered that the Democratic nominee would name her running mate at a rally in Florida this afternoon — and that said running mate would be Virginia senator Tim Kaine. Countless journalists spent their mornings crafting puns to commemorate this historic moment (“Yes We Kaine,” “Kaine and Able,” “The Mark of Kaine“). But Clinton did not give our nation a Kaine-ing in Tampa. In fact, she did not pick any veep at all.
Instead, she appears to have used the promise of a veep selection as a ruse to get the national news media to cover her rally with the same intensity that it monitors Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. And, while under that spotlight, Clinton gave her rebuttal to Trump’s extremely bleak and incredibly authoritarian RNC speech. Beyond leveling her standard criticisms of Trump’s divisiveness, Clinton dug in on a line flagged by her primary opponent Thursday night.
“I’ve never heard of an American leader, or at least someone who wants to be an American leader, claiming that he’s all we need — that’s not a democracy, my friends,” Clinton said. “As I recall, we had a revolution so that we didn’t have someone who said, ‘I can fix it alone.’”
Clinton is expected to appear with her running mate at a rally in Miami on Saturday.
