There’s a big reason why Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine as her running mate: He’s a shrewd inside player just as devoted to the details of policy as he is to the mechanics of politics.

The Virginia Democrat’s dexterity — both in winning elections and then in governing after the ballots are counted — is illuminated in thousands of emails Kaine and his staff wrote during a single term in charge of Virginia, and which POLITICO closely studied to understand the style and character of someone who may be next in line to the next president of the United States.


Those messages show Kaine is no Joe Biden: He’s a media-savvy executive who avoids gaffes by discussing tricky topics with his staff before he speaks with reporters. He pays attention to even the smallest of detail — making his own spread sheets, editing his online biography — and he doesn’t hesitate to throw around his connections with a certain politician named Barack Obama.

In fact, Kaine, who put off graduating from Harvard Law School to volunteer as a Roman Catholic missionary in Honduras, casts his own career in Obama-like terms.

“I’m a civil rights lawyer who made a choice after 17 years of doing civil rights work to do it in a new way -- that pretty much sums it up,” Kaine told POLITICO.

Kaine’s understated explanation — in response to a question about his professional arc that has him on the cusp of the White House — belies the real reason that he was seen as the safest and strongest VP choice for Clinton. He has a mastery of the behind-the-scenes tasks necessary to govern. And he’s proven capable of winning multiple elections in the battleground of Virginia, as well as across the other 49 states after a stint as chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Obama’s first term.

That finely-tuned political antenna, as well as his love for a policy white paper, especially comes through in the emails that POLITICO read — more than 145,000 so far have been released by Virginia’s state library, in several little-noticed batches, since 2014.

Foremost, Kaine’s emails show his managerial skills through non-stop attention to the details of his administration. Some of his messages deal with the raw emotions surrounding human tragedy. For example, in the aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings that left 32 students and faculty dead, Kaine and his senior staff debated whether his signature should go at the bottom of an in-depth letter to the victims’ families discussing the status of an independent review into the massacre.

Kaine initially wanted his name on the December 2008 letter but ultimately agreed with his top counselor, Larry Roberts, that he should leave his name off it to avoid creating the impression that he would then be the one who should respond personally to everyone’s complaints. “I think the little lost in me not being the signator is outweighed by the concerns you set out,” Kaine wrote. “And the families trust you.”

Kaine’s attention to minutiae extended to Virginia’s pocket book. “This puts my mind at ease,” the governor wrote to his Finance secretary in December 2007 after being told there was only $12 million in state Treasury holdings tied to Countrywide Financial Corp. and other securities affected by the rapidly unfolding subprime mortgage crisis.

In a December 2009 memo, Kaine showed off his inner wonk by sharing a spread sheet he’d created to compare median income data between Virginia and the rest of the country. “These are good stats for telling our economic success story,” he wrote.

Kaine also shows off how he’s a regular visitor to the state’s websites. “Every six months or so, I look at the web page bio and try to think about updates,” he wrote in an email just after Christmas 2007, flagging several sentences on the site that described promises he’d been “planning to do” that year but had since accomplished.

The governor’s proof reading extended to other internal documents too, including an agenda for his mid-term 2007 Cabinet retreat. “It sounds too past tense,” Kaine wrote to his chief of staff after reviewing an outline for the day’s events, urging an alternative description for a planned discussion that was originally billed as a “retrospective.”

Kaine’s emails show he was engaged on everything from traffic flows on southbound I-95 to explanations on why he picked one state lawmaker over another to sponsor income tax legislation. “Because I know him much better,” the governor wrote.

That attention to detail was not lost on his senior staff either. “He understood every budget issue, even if we’re talking about a $4,500 commitment,” Jody Wagner, Kaine’s former Finance secretary, said in an interview.

Preston Bryant, who served as Kaine’s secretary of Natural Resources, said the governor would routinely come in on Monday mornings with handwritten notes for his Cabinet asking questions about what he’d read in his weekend briefing books. A similar process occurred when Kaine reviewed a draft version of the state’s 2007 energy plan, a lengthy document that Bryant said he expected Kaine wouldn’t read beyond the executive summary. Instead, the governor handed back to him a document full of red line edits.

“Comprehensively, he’d read that damn thing,” Bryant recalled.

Kaine’s emails also show that throughout his single term as governor — Virginia law prohibits consecutive reelection bids — he and his staff were paying careful attention to his image in the media. He was after all a Democratic official in a state that before Obama’s 2008 victory had voted Republican in nine straight presidential elections. Obama had even considered him as a potential running mate. And while Kaine didn’t have an immediate job lined up when his four years were up as governor, his staff was insistent that he leave office with a “narrative” of his record just in case another political opportunity came along.

“The idea here is for people to have a shorter storyline to share, ie., something they can tell on the cocktail circuit that is neither too lengthy nor too detail-laden,” Kaine’s spokeswoman, Lynda Tran, wrote him a few months before the end of his term. She outlined a brief write-up to him describing that narrative, namely that he had “sealed his reputation as a crisis manager” by governing the state during the Virginia Tech shooting and the Great Recession and that he had “taken Virginia from a state known for its proximity to Washington, DC to a state that’s now known for its relevance in Washington, DC.”

Kaine’s courtship of the press — he had originally gone to the University of Missouri for a journalism degree but switched majors after discovering reporters at the student newspaper were too “cynical” — entailed making himself available frequently to the national press. After he published a December 2009 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how Virginia was handling payday predatory lending, he and Tran discussed strategies to do as many national television hits as they could.

His messages also show a hyper focus on local reporters, including using the media to outflank his Republican opponents.

“The more I can get TV and print coverage in the home areas of key legislators on the main issues, the better we will probably do,” Kaine told his staff in a 2007 year-end memo where he suggests getting out of Richmond as much as possible “talking to people about how the internal debate really affects their communities.”

Kaine’s emails show a recognition for how stories sometimes emerge from closed-door meetings. Preparing for a December 2009 visit with Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell, Kaine and his staff discuss just how much detail they should share with his Republican successor about their final outgoing budget proposal.

“I think the chance of leaks is pretty high,” Kaine wrote. “Sometimes leaks are not all bad, but do we want to give the whole thing away before I speak tomorrow morning?”

Kaine and his aides used email to discuss potential landmines if they misspoke or veered off message with the press. In June 2009, the Virginia Department of Corrections had ordered a smoking ban inside all its facilities. Tran ran a statement by the governor that she was preparing for the Washington Post that called the policy change a good move for public health. “This ban will also save health care costs we incur for prisoners, but we may not want to go there,” the governor replied.

The Kaine emails also offer a glimpse into his role as a major political player. He’d ridden his predecessor Mark Warner’s coattails into the governor’s mansion in 2005 — catching an early wave of voters’ anti-George W. Bush sentiment that one year later would put Democrats in charge of both chambers of Congress — and then made the far-sighted decision to endorse Obama over Hillary Clinton early on in the 2008 Democratic primaries. That move made sense for Kaine on a very personal level — he and Obama had shared backgrounds as civil rights attorneys with Harvard Law School degrees and they’d both met their wives while studying in Boston. Their mothers were also from the same small Kansas town of El Dorado.

It also benefited Kaine on the political front. Through the rest of term as governor, which overlapped with his time as the head of the DNC, Kaine had easy access to Team Obama.

One classic example: In early January 2010, Kaine forwarded to Jim Messina, the White House deputy chief of staff, several documents outlining an “alternative student loan proposal” that had been shared with him by Virginia-based Sallie Mae.

“I have no expertise in this area so cannot vouch for the proposal, but wanted to forward it in case it represents a workable compromise,” Kaine wrote to the senior Obama aide, before adding a personal aside that a few weeks earlier he’d been watching the Senate vote to approve the Affordable Care Act “from my elliptical machine…and it was very powerful.”

The closeness of the Obama-Kaine relationship comes through in another email from the governor even before the president is sworn into office. Prepping for a dinner in November 2008 with the president-elect and other governors, Kaine wrote his staff: “There is a great chance that Barack will push a big package of road and rail infrastructure investments. This will be great for Virginia.”

Kaine’s closeness to the Obama White House afforded him several other opportunities to flex his muscles. In December 2009, the governor instructed his chief of staff to set up a meeting between Vice President Biden’s office and David Poisson, a state Delegate in the Democratic leadership and an attorney who was helping companies obtain stimulus funds for weatherization projects. “Knowing how important this particular priority is to the President, David has some good ideas about how the program can be better run to do the important environmental work and use it to create meaningful jobs,” Kaine wrote.

Obama’s staff rarely left Kaine hanging. In another pre-Inauguration move, Kaine urged Obama to get involved in a fight involving the lame duck Bush administration’s plan to move a Naval nuclear carrier from Hampton Roads, Virginia, down to Florida. Kaine’s request: Could the president-elect make a statement on the issue, and fast.

“This is viewed in the military community as a political move to punish Virginia, which just elected its second Democratic Senator and switched its Congressional representative in Hampton Roads from Republican to Democrat,” Kaine wrote in an email just two weeks after the 2008 election to Denis McDonough, the future White House chief of staff who was then a top national security adviser to the president-elect. “I have been a long-time supporter of the Senator’s and would really appreciate your guidance on this matter.”

McDonough’s reply: “We will get to work.”

Donovan Harrell and Dan Spinelli contributed to this report.