Faced with polls showing that many young voters intend to cast their ballots for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson or the Green candidate Jill Stein, or for no one at all, the Hillary Clinton campaign has sent Chelsea Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren to Ohio. On Thursday, the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, arrived in New Hampshire to see what he could do about the problem. First up was a panel discussion with a group of young professionals, in Portsmouth. As props, Kaine had brought copies of Clinton’s campaign book (“Fifteenth on the New York Times best-seller list!” he said) and Donald Trump’s, which is titled “Crippled America.” Kaine considered the Clinton book’s cover, with a photograph of Clinton and Kaine raising their arms in a victory pose. “We’re both smiling,” he pointed out. Trump, he said, had contrived to look both condescending and sour in his, “sitting in a penthouse, looking like he’s sucking on six lemons.” Kaine said he had a fundamentally different view of Americans than the billionaire: “We are an optimistic, can-do, patriotic, problem-solving people.”

Kaine on the stump has a touch of Al Franken’s old “Saturday Night Live” character Stuart Smalley: he is a figure of affirmation. At the coffee shop in Portsmouth, Kaine, wearing a blue striped tie and a blue shirt, and sitting beneath a blue Clinton-Kaine sign, kept using the word “celebration.“ “Gosh, if there’s anything millennials will unify around, it’s this notion of acceptance, and more than that—celebration,” Kaine said. He said small businesses should “be celebrated, not kicked to the curb,” and he claimed that he found campaigning “delightful.” He praised startup culture with an enthusiasm that suggested those polls showing that young voters view capitalism unfavorably have not been widely circulated within the Clinton campaign. Apart from the press, there were about three dozen people at the Portsmouth event, maybe half of them young; Kaine kept speaking about millennials, though no one else did. “Assume we want to have a millennial-friendly Administration,” he said. “What other issues would we want to talk about?”

Every candidate finds in young voters his own image. Barack Obama detected optimism and diversity; Bernie Sanders noticed an experience at the economic margins and the thirst for a radically different future. Kaine on Thursday was working toward another idea, in which what was significant about millennials was how unexceptional they were, how mainstream and thwarted their desires. Kaine described student debt as an economic problem, which placed obstacles between young people and the lives they wanted. “Can they buy a home? Maybe not for a while,” he said. “Can they really choose the path that inspires them? Maybe not for a while.” He described climate change, among other things, in terms of its effect on property values, mentioning the pretty, old town of Portsmouth, Virginia, where flooding had begun to creep into the streets. Those properties were families’ major financial assets, he pointed out. He described “an entrepreneurial culture among millennials.” He seemed to imagine them as future Rotary Club members—aspiring small businessmen and homeowners, the joiners and the concerned.

Each of the Clinton surrogates’ appearances this week has been promoted with nearly identical press-release language: Chelsea Clinton, Warren, Sanders, and Kaine would each lay out the stakes of the election for millennials. Beyond the question of a student-debt burden, though, what did the campaign have in mind? One basic question that has run through the Democratic primary content, between Clinton and Sanders, and now through the general-election season, is whether young voters want to overthrow the systems of power in this country or join them. The patriotic vision of America that Clinton has unfurled in this campaign is of an effortful social machine, of ordinary teachers and soldiers and small businessmen whose work Trump denigrates. The problem for Clinton is that she herself rarely matches this image—she does not appear to most voters an earnest provincial try-hard, a community servant. Tim Kaine does.

Kaine has been in elected office for twenty-two years, starting out on the Richmond City Council, and for much of that time he must have thought that his great battle would be to make Virginia less conservative. “It was super-red at the time,” he said yesterday, recalling the state at the beginning of his political career, and there are moments when you catch a glimpse of how much time he has spent preparing to defend the basic Democratic view of policy. At a speech at Exeter Town Hall, a few hours after the Portsmouth event, he speedily dismantled Donald Trump’s newly announced maternity-leave plan. The Clinton campaign, Kaine said, had a proposal to require twelve weeks, compared to Trump’s six weeks, and it was structured as a tax credit, as opposed to Trump’s tax deduction, because deductions favor the rich. Kaine pointed out that Trump’s proposal would draw maternity-leave money from state unemployment funds, which was both “stigmatizing” and meant, strangely, that new mothers would be competing for the money with unemployed workers. Clinton’s plan is structured as a mandatory family-leave program, not limited to women giving birth. Kaine said that part of the reason was that the campaign thought that people should be able to leave work to take care of sick relatives. He also said that if family leave applied equally to men and women, you made it less likely that employers would consciously or unconsciously discriminate against young women. Earlier in the day, Kaine had mentioned, hesitantly, that the Trump campaign had not introduced a higher-education plan. “They still might,” he said, sounding a little hopeful.

Vice-Presidents have a way of becoming complementary to the Presidents they serve. Al Gore grew dreamier as Bill Clinton became a figure of compromise, politically and ethically. Dick Cheney hardened as a guard against George W. Bush’s advertisements of compassion. Joe Biden, once he filled the second slot on a ticket led by a forty-six-year-old intellectual, remade himself as a tribune of enduring working-class values. The role of Biden’s racial identity, when he stood alongside the first black President, was thematically rich but mostly left unspoken; Kaine is far more direct about the identity politics of his ticket. In his stump speeches, he mentions all the women—his wife, Anne Holton, first of all—who have taken background roles in his political career (as campaign managers, aides, donors, volunteers) while his own name has been on the “bumper sticker, the lawn sign, the ballot.” In Exeter, he said that, as Hillary Clinton’s running mate, “I’m a strong man who’s really excited to play that supporting role.”

This is part of what was up with all the dad jokes that were made after Kaine’s Democratic National Convention speech, by the sort of young people whom Kaine is now trying to reach. “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,” one viewer wrote on Twitter. “Tim Kaine is the dad who made you sit and ~really listen~ to his jazz albums.” “Tim Kaine is your super-nerdy uncle but then he knows the full lyrics to a Drake song and everyone’s like ‘OH SHIT UNCLE TIM.’ ” Race comes in here subtly—but the idea here isn’t that Kaine is “woke,” as Michigan’s Governor Jennifer Granholm put it this summer. It’s that his public character is a pretty rare one right now: a middle-aged white man who is just not anxious about change.

At a certain point, when liberals were trying to reconcile themselves with Clinton’s selection of Kaine, rather than one of the more obviously exciting Vice-Presidential choices (Elizabeth Warren), they pitched the original slur on him, that he was dull, as a virtue. “‘Boring is not so bad,” Ed Kilgore argued at the New York Web site. In Exeter, Kaine was introduced by a tall young man named Colin van Ostern, the Democratic candidate for governor of New Hampshire, whose stump speech (needing, to this reporter’s ear, some work) hinged on his successful efforts, as an executive at Stonyfield, to reduce the weight of organic-yogurt packaging. Taking the stage, Kaine grabbed the younger man’s hand and impulsively thrust it into the air. There are virtues that are more important to Clinton’s campaign than excitement. There is the image of a political establishment that is open and functioning. There is the reminder that a churchy, middle-aged white father might see a changing society as something not to disdain but to celebrate.