In a year when trust may be the biggest political issue, and stridency the usual tone, Sen. Tim Kaine brings something unusual to the race for the White House: sincerity and a genuine friendliness.



His easygoing manner and moderate stands hide both a sharp intellect and deep commitment to principles that had put him at odds with President Barack Obama — a president he has long supported — over the core constitutional question of war-making power. Kaine persuaded Obama to his view.



Even many of his political opponents in Virginia say they just like the guy.



Kaine has been carving out a national profile as Virginia's junior senator by regularly turning to Virginians' daily lives and his own career in state and city politics to make his points.



He's said Washington needs to take lessons from states like Virginia and cities like Richmond, where he entered politics as a city councilman promising to build bridges and where he was an activist mayor. Both state and city, he notes, have focused debt-management targets.



And the thousands of Virginians serving overseas in the military — many from Hampton Roads — deserve congressional debate on the authorization of military action against the Islamic State. It's a basic constitutional responsibility, he argues, and his firm stance eventually convinced a reluctant Obama to agree. So far, however, Congress has not had that debate.



That, Kaine said, leaves soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to dangle, with no idea whether the dangers they face really matter to Congress at all.



Kaine is very much in a Virginia tradition of moderation and consultation, said Bill Bolling, the conservative Republican who served as lieutenant governor during Kaine's term as governor from 2006 to 2010.



On the day after their election in 2005, Bolling recalls, Kaine called him, congratulated him and invited him to sit down for lunch and a chat.



"He said we've got to figure out how to make this work," Bolling said.



They agreed to find common ground where they could, and to disagree, but without that Washington-style approach of talking past one another when they could not.



"That's his hallmark: agreeing to disagree, respectfully, and looking for where we can agree and move ahead," Bolling said.



Bolling is particularly proud of the way the two, working together, successfully made the case for expanding Virginia's health insurance coverage for children in low-income families.



They joined hands on efforts to protect the state's environment, as well, he added. They balanced concerns for preserving open space with the needs of businesses to be able to tap the state's natural resources, as Bolling sees it.



The two also broke partisan ranks to join forces on an issue that's yet to move in Virginia: taking the politics out of drawing the lines for General Assembly and congressional districts, Bolling said. Most Virginia elected officials, of either party, hate that idea.



Kaine worked well with Republican majorities in the General Assembly during his time as governor, said former state Sen. John Watkins, R- Powhatan.



"We were Republicans and he was a Democrat, so there was always that specter of — I don't want to say mistrust — but what he's good at is what Hillary Clinton needs, and that's building trust," Watkins said. "He's trustworthy. If he tells you he's going to do something, he's going to do it."



Watkins saw that in the battle to fix Virginia's broken transportation financing system early in Kaine's term.



"We worked hard to get a transportation bill out of there," only to stumble on a legal challenge to a proposal for special transportation tax districts in Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia, he said.



Watkins also worked closely with Kaine to tackle a funding gap in the Virginia Retirement System — and he thinks Kaine's approach there mirrors his efforts to fix the federal budget mess.



"You're not going to fix it overnight, whether you're Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton," Watkins said. "It's too big to fix overnight; so what you do is what we did with the VRS, you put together a plan to fix things incrementally."



And then, of course, follow it.



"He's serious about issues that will make things better in the long run," Watkins said.



"He's one of the most sincere, genuine people in politics," he added.



Kaine grew up in Kanas City. His father ran an ironworking shop where the young Kaine worked, before going on to graduate from Harvard Law School.



Before graduating though, he took a year off to work with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras, teaching at a technical school — an experience that led him to help form the Senate's career and technical education caucus.



He's called for the U.S. to do more to help in Honduras' struggle with drug violence.



On immigration, he's bemoaned the toxic rhetoric in this year's campaigning.



Earlier this year, he told the National Association of Hispanic Publications and National Newspaper Publishers Association's legislative conference that Virginia's economic successes have a lot to do with immigration.



"Guess what it's coincided with? An embrace of greater diversity, an embrace of immigration, an embrace of, frankly, what we promised we would be when we called ourselves a commonwealth rather than a state," he said. "Commonwealth ... It's supposed to be a place where everybody can be together around the table."



Kaine settled in Richmond after marrying Anne Holton, daughter of former Republican Gov. Linwood Holton, building a small business-oriented law practice in which he quickly turned his attention to the challenges low-income Richmonders faced getting decent affordable housing.



He won settlements against landlords for discriminating against African-Americans. Representing a Richmond nonprofit and African-Americans denied homeowners insurance he won a landmark $100 million anti-discrimination verdict against Nationwide Insurance in 1998.



"The case changed the insurance industry overnight," said Kaine's law partner, Tom Wolf. Kaine — in large part by asking why an internal memo talking about a unexpectedly high percentage of African-Americans in his ZIP code — made insurers realize that what they thought was an ordinary risk-assessment was really racial discrimination, Wolf said.



Kaine still owns the five-bedroom brick home at the corner of Confederate Avenue and Chatham Road in Richmond that he bought in 1992 that is now assessed at $340,000. His financial disclosure forms show he's far from the wealthiest senator, reporting assets — almost all mutual funds — worth somewhere between $300,000 and $810,000.



Wolf, who brought Kaine into his law firm because he was impressed with the younger lawyer's work on a death penalty case, says elected office hasn't changed his friend at all.



"He's just not motivated by money or title or power," Wolf said. "He just really believes in public service, and if he lost an election, he'd find other ways of doing that."



It was from that Confederate Avenue home that he had jumped into the fractious world of Richmond city politics, winning election to the City Council in 1994. In 1998, the City Council elected him mayor.



"I used to tell him, 'Tim, you spend too much time listening,'" said Richmond attorney Rudy McCollum, who sat next to Kaine on the council, and who stepped aside from a bid for the mayoralty in 1998 to clear the way for his seat-mate.



"We had a very racially divided city, and I thought if anyone could make it better, it was him," McCollum said. "He had the sensitivity and the willingness to work with the entire community."



Traveling the state, beginning with his successful 2001 campaign to be lieutenant governor, and going on from there to win election as governor in 2005, Kaine tapped into issues — and delights — of other parts of Virginia.



Tales from friends in Norfolk about flooding streets, for instance, helped inform his push for a stepped-up federal and state effort on sea-level rise.



After a session with advocates for victims of sexual assault in Charlottesville, Kaine sponsored legislation to encourage schools to teach students about preventing dating violence.



Alarmed by the what he's heard about the epidemic of opioid abuse in much of rural Virginia, Kaine has been pushing to increase access to overdose medication.



And when he heard about the 14-fold increase a Williamsburg retiree faced in her life-saving medicine, he helped her share her story with a Senate panel and focus its attention on price gouging by firms that buy the rights to older specialty drugs.



Early in his term, taking a break from a bluegrass jam session in Floyd County — he plays harmonica — Kaine joked that his casual, friendly style seemed to take Washington aback.



In those first few months, senators gathered for a tense meeting that seemed headed for showdown over filibuster rules, he said.



But laughter broke the ice, Kaine said, when his Russell Senate Office Building neighbor, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, stood up to say the Virginian "had gotten into political trouble by being nice to me."



Ress can be reached by phone at 757-247-4535.