WASHINGTON — The day after Barack Obama became the first African-American to win the White House, Tim Kaine, then the governor of Virginia, visited a civil rights memorial in Richmond. There, in a former capital of the Confederacy, he summed up the history-making moment in four words.

“Ol’ Virginny is dead,” an exhausted but happy Mr. Kaine declared.

It was a reference to a former official state song whose slavery-era lyrics — “this old darkey’s heart” who “labored hard for old massa” — stood for a history that Mr. Kaine, a Midwest-born, Harvard-educated former civil rights lawyer, abhorred. But Mr. Obama’s six-point victory in Virginia was also, in a way, a parallel of Mr. Kaine’s own success there.

As mayor of Richmond, lieutenant governor, governor, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and now senator, Mr. Kaine has deftly managed his own rise as a progressive in a bastion of Southern conservatism.