On a recent morning in Washington, D.C., Tim Kaine, the Democratic nominee for Vice-President, ambled into a room at the Jefferson Hotel and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Tim.” With thinning gray-brown hair, sensible rubber-soled loafers, and an expression of surprised contentment, he looked, at fifty-eight, like the happy customer in an insurance commercial. Despite more than two decades in politics—he has been a governor of Virginia and the head of the Democratic National Committee, and is now a member of the U.S. Senate—he is unassuming to the point of obscurity. In September, more than six weeks after he became Hillary Clinton’s running mate, forty per cent of voters said that they had never heard of Tim Kaine or had no opinion of him, according to a CNN/ORC International poll.

The absence of slickness has been mostly for the good. Paired with one of the best-known and least-trusted nominees in Presidential history, Kaine has helped the Clinton campaign look less frosty and stage-managed. Last week, as women came forward to accuse Donald Trump of groping them, the Times columnist Gail Collins suggested that “boring people have never looked better.” Kaine spent years cultivating his reputation for approachability, and he has parted with it grudgingly. Once he became the nominee, his wife, Anne Holton, a lawyer and former Virginia secretary of education, continued driving the family’s Volkswagen Jetta around Richmond, until Secret Service personnel prevailed upon her to accept a ride from them. In Kaine’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, he touted his Midwestern roots, and mocked Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “Believe me!,” inspiring a round of dad jokes online. (“Tim Kaine is your friend’s dad who catches you smoking weed at a sleepover and doesn’t rat you out but talks to you about brain development.”)

When we met, Kaine was back in Washington, after a string of campaign stops, to cast two votes in the Senate. Earlier in the week, he had appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” where the host had arranged a surprise visit by John Popper, the harmonica maestro from Blues Traveler. Kaine is a harmonica buff who has performed in a bluegrass bar band called the Jugbusters. Popper left him starstruck. “After Toots Thielemans died, he’s now the man,” Kaine told me. “Toots Thielemans was the man, and played a different style—Toots played chromatic and was a jazz player—but, since he died, Popper’s the guy.” Popper had given Kaine a copy of his memoir (“Suck and Blow”), and he was midway through it. “I’ve been on a string of music books, so I read Elvis Costello’s autobiography. I read this book by Bob Mehr—who worked for the Memphis Appeal—called ‘Trouble Boys,’ about the Replacements, a band that I really love,” Kaine went on. “Then I have another book—it’s called ‘The Saint and the Sultan’—that I’m halfway through, about this weird moment in St. Francis of Assisi’s life, where he went to Egypt to meet with one of the main religious leaders to try to broker an end to the Crusades. I didn’t know that part of his life.”

A devout Roman Catholic, Kaine is more comfortable quoting Scripture than any Democrat to reach the level of Presidential politics since Jimmy Carter. Asked to name his heroes, Kaine begins with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazis for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. For more than three decades, Kaine and his family have attended St. Elizabeth’s, a traditionally black church in Richmond. “We deliberately put ourselves in a position where we are in a racial minority,” Holton told me. “Our African-American friends have done that all their lives in one context or another. There is insight that we can learn.” She went on, “It’s no longer just the divide between black and white. Virginia’s gotten more diverse, but how do we come together across differences of all sorts?”

Some Catholics criticize Kaine for his political support of abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and the ordination of women as priests. In a statement made in July, Bishop Thomas Tobin, of the Diocese of Providence, declared, “Senator Kaine has said, ‘My faith is central to everything I do.’ But apparently, and unfortunately, his faith isn’t central to his public, political life.” Kaine describes the connection between his politics and his faith as the “Good Samaritan position.” He asked, “Who’s beaten up and lying on the side of the road now? Is it somebody in an immigration detention camp? Is it an L.G.B.T. kid who’s going to a high school and getting bullied and feeling not only bullied in high school but feeling like the governor of their state is kicking them around?”

As a politician, Kaine has elements of Joe Biden’s heart and Barack Obama’s brain: schmaltz in service of political advantage. He has never lost an election—from Richmond City Council, in 1994, to lieutenant governor, in 2001, governor, in 2005, and senator, in 2012. In one of thousands of e-mails released by Virginia’s State Library from his days as governor, Kaine once lamented to aides that, despite a decent record—he cut the budget, expanded early-childhood and technical education, secured funding for higher-education construction, reformed mental-health and foster-care programs, and reduced infant mortality—his term was often described, by the press, as having “no significant accomplishment.” He asked his staff what he could do to build the “Kaine brand.” The e-mails also reveal a micromanager: he tweaked the language of press releases, monitored the traffic on major highways, and updated his online bio to reflect new achievements. In December, 2009, he sent around a spreadsheet that he had created in his spare time, showing median-income data in Virginia and other states. “These are good stats for telling our economic success story,” he wrote.

Kaine’s rise to the Vice-Presidential nomination owes much to his style of ecumenical politics, a blend of nonconformity and calculation. When Barack Obama was a freshman senator, he visited Kaine in Virginia and they became friends. “We were both entering into the national phases of our careers,” Obama told me in a recent interview. “I had been elected in 2004, sworn in in 2005. Tim was then running for governor, and I was asked to come down and campaign. And, immediately, I just loved the guy. Part of it is the integrity that he exudes. It’s not phony. You know the guy is who he says he is.”

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Kaine and Obama were both civil-rights lawyers trained at Harvard Law School, with prominent wives and young families. Their mothers happened to be from the same small Kansas town, El Dorado. When one of Kaine’s friends, a Richmond lawyer named Tom Wolf, met Obama, Wolf told him, “You know who you are? You’re the black Tim Kaine.”

When Obama ran for President in 2008, Kaine endorsed him early, over the Party favorite, Hillary Clinton, and Obama returned to Richmond for the announcement. “He was actually the first major elected official outside of Illinois to endorse my Presidency,” Obama said. “And I still remember making the announcement of that endorsement in the former seat of the Confederacy—the symbolism wasn’t lost on him—but also the fact that he was taking a risk at that stage. I wasn’t the favored candidate. What I have seen consistently from Tim is somebody who pays attention to politics, who is not unmindful that, as Lincoln said, with public opinion there’s nothing you can’t do—and without public opinion there’s very little you can get done.”