As Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican senator with whom Kaine is collaborating on a rewrite of the rules for the nation going to war, said on Twitter Friday, “Trying to count the ways I hate @timkaine. Drawing a blank.”

Yes, Kaine is ascending to the vice presidential nomination entirely at Clinton’s whim. But she has selected someone who achieved power, in part, without appearing to covet it. Contrast that with five of Kaine’s predecessors and successors as governor who either sought the presidency — officially or unofficially — or openly maneuvered for the vice presidency: fellow Democrats Doug Wilder and Mark Warner and Republicans George Allen, Jim Gilmore and Bob McDonnell.

Sometimes, in politics, opportunity is simply about being there.

Until the heady events of this past weekend, that’s what the Senate seemed to be for Kaine.

Father-in-law Linwood Holton, from 1970 to 1974, Virginia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, said that Kaine was focusing on his path through the Senate; whether he could start moving into the leadership. He was preparing to seek a second term in 2018, an off-year election — and for the next president, a midterm referendum — in which the customary decline in turnout can imperil an incumbent, as it did Warner in 2014.