Kaine backs Obama

RICHMOND - Gov. Timothy M. Kaine endorsed U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, for president Saturday before each Democrat spoke to 3,500 party faithful at a $165-a-plate fundraising dinner.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, appeared at the governor’s mansion with Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, where the four Harvard Law graduates spent 40 minutes talking inside.

Kaine became the second governor to endorse Obama, and the first outside the senator’s home state of Illinois.

“Even though it is still early, I am very happy to say that it is a very simple decision for me in terms of my assessment of where the nation is and these candidates to endorse Barack Obama to be our nation’s next president,” Kaine told a gathering of more than 50 state and national reporters.

“What you see in Senator Obama is excellence that begins with values,” Kaine said. He said Obama had focused on hard issues like “ethics reform in Illinois, and in a very difficult political environment trying to reform a death penalty law.”

Obama will “help us get into a politics that is better, a politics that is a lot more about results and about people than about toting up a win or a loss for a party or a partisan position.”

Both men said Virginia will be in play for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2008. Obama faces Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and perhaps as many as eight other Democrats in a February 12 primary across Virginia.

Obama said Americans can overcome current problems and love their country, starting “by reminding ourselves that we have overcome bigger challenges than we face today,” such as World War II.

He said Hurricane Katrina “reminded us that we should have high expectations for our government.”

“Here we are in the heart of what was the Confederacy and for me to be able to stand here as an African American reflects the enormous progress that this country has made,” Obama said. He called his candidacy for president “one more step that we have taken to live up to the essential creed that Virginia’s first citizen, Thomas Jefferson, wrote about in the Declaration of Independence.”

Brian J. Moran, D-Alexandria and the House of Delegates Democratic Caucus chairman, said, “Obama brings a fresh face and is inspiring and he’ll bring new ideas and that’s what I think the people of Virginia and this country are looking for.”

Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first elected black governor in 1989, later welcomed a crowd to the Richmond Convention Center and said, “Let us never forget, Virginia is nobody’s red state.”

Obama drew sustained applause from the record Democratic fundraising crowd when he spoke of ending the war in Iraq and improving the quality of education in America.

“We know that we need to pay teachers more if we are going to attract the next generation of educators,” he said. “We know that [the federal education act called] NCLB left the money behind.”

Obama told the crowd that “whether you were for the war [or against it], it’s time to bring an end to this war. … We know that it’s time to bring our troops home [from Iraq and] to deal with the unfinished business in Afghanistan.”

Speaking of Iraq, he said, “We’re fighting a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged.”

By Bob Gibson