Tim Kaine biography

Synopsis

Profile

Politician, lawyer, Virginia governor. Timothy Michael Kaine was born Feb. 26, 1958, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the eldest son of an ironworker and a home economics teacher. Kaine grew up in the Kansas City area, graduating from Rockhurst High School, an all-boys Jesuit high school, in 1976. Kaine attended the University of Missouri, where he completed his bachelor's degree in economics in three years. He then entered Harvard Law School, but took a year off to work with the Jesuit order as a Romanic Catholic missionary.

Living in Honduras, Kaine ran a small vocational school for teenage boys while honing his Spanish.

Kaine returned to Cambridge and received his law degree from Harvard in 1983. He practiced law in Richmond, Virginia, for 17 years, specializing in representing people who had been denied housing opportunities because of their race or disability. He also taught legal ethics at the University of Richmond Law School.

Kaine entered politics in 1994 when he was elected to the Richmond City Council. He served six years, including the last two as mayor when he was credited with helping to create and implement the law known as Project Exile which was credited with reducing gun-related violence.

Kaine was elected Virginia's lieutenant governor in 2001, serving as President of the Senate of Virginia. When he ran for governor in 2005, Kaine introduced himself as a leader guided by his ??family and Christian faith.?? He also urged his fellow religious Democrats to talk about their faith in campaigns, saying ??Voters want to understand what motivates you.?? When Republicans attacked Kaine's opposition to the death penalty, he responded with a TV ad in which he explained that his religious beliefs led him to oppose capital punishment, but that he would enforce the state's laws.

Kaine was elected by narrowly defeating Republican former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore. He was inaugurated in Virginia's colonial capitol of Williamsburg on January 14, 2006. Shortly after Kaine's term began, he was selected to give the Democratic response to President Bush's State of the Union address.

He was also the first governor outside Illinois to endorse Barack Obama for president and as a popular governor of a critical swing state, was widely considered a strong candidate to be picked as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's running mate.

Kaine met his wife, Anne Holton, at Harvard Law School. The two were in a study group together, and she baked cookies in an attempt to gain his attention. Anne is the daughter of former Republican Virginia Governor Linwood Holton (1970-74), who desegregated the Commonwealth's public schools.