Hillary and Tim: a "safe" ticket?

Tim Kaine by conventional assumptions is a safe pick for Hillary Clinton's running mate.

Which, as Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks explains, is both the good news and the bad news. He even thinks Tim Kaine is "secretly liberal"!

Tim Kaine is Hillary's VP! Is it the right pick? 07/24/2016:

Ed Kilgore in The Clinton-Kaine Ticket Is Safe and Boring — in a Good Way New York 07/22/2016 looks at Tim Kaine's strengths as a Vice Presidential candidate:

For all the talk of Kaine as a sort of political wallflower, he is actually an estimable man who has won losable campaigns in a state Republicans may need to win this year. He has a reputation as being ethically spotless, which matters a lot this year — any hint of scandal in a running mate could be disastrous for Clinton. As has often been noted, he is fluent in Spanish, which is not only a good weapon in a campaign against Donald “Deport ‘Em All” Trump, but a sop to those who were disappointed that the Veep was not Hispanic.

But he also cautions about the real risks of, well, excessive caution:

Given the Clinton family reputation for taking the Left for granted or even triangulating against it, raising Kaine to the ticket plays some bad old tapes in the minds of many progressives. And it’s not like the Virginian has the sort of inspirational persona that’s going to appeal to the young Sanders voters whose November turnout levels are in doubt. With the Republican nominee posturing as an anti-Wall Street, anti-status quo candidate, there may even be fears that Kaine will expose the ticket to further erosion of white working class support.

Steve M, a hardcore Hillary supporter during the primaries, also expresses concern on the latter score, Kaine is okay, but he won't help Clinton win over white men No More Mister Nice Blog 07/23/2016:

That's not how it works. As the GOP and Fox News have proven, white male heartlanders respond to coastal elites, women, and sometimes non-whites if they say what the white male heartlanders want to hear. New York billionaire Donald Trump is the obvious example, but heartlanders respond well to Fox's East Coast-centric talent pool (Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro). They love Sheriff David Clarke, a black gun nut and Black Lives Matter foe, who spoke at Trump's convention and is a frequent Fox guest. They admire Clarence Thomas and (until recently) Ted Cruz. They love Sarah Palin and Joni Ernst.

And they responded to New York-born, Vermont-based, Jewish agnostic socialist Bernie Sanders this year. That's the problem: Working-class whites are in an anti-elite frame of mind right now, and Clinton just picked someone who's easy to dismiss as a friend of the elites.