Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) is Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s running mate.  Clinton said in her speech introducing him that he as a good Progressive candidate, and in a later speech, Kaine agreed with that characterization.

OK.  Let’s accept his Progressivism, even though the Leftists don’t entirely agree.

Kaine makes a big deal about his work as a missionary in Honduras.  Kudos to him for his contributions to Hondurans.

But we should ask him: what has he done for Americans, say in Appalachia, where his running mate has promised to destroy Applachians’ jobs and make them dependents of government, or in the Ozarks, where jobs are similarly scarce and opportunity similarly limited?

We should ask him, too, whether he supports his fellow Progressive Democrat’s—New York Governor Mario Cuomo—active obstruction of New Yorkers’ opportunities while simultaneously jacking up the cost of heating their homes in those northeastern winters with his ban fracking.

Does he care only about foreign poverty–a legitimate concern, to be sure–and not about poverty and opportunity in his own country?  We do, after all, have an AmeriCorps VISTA program that’s alive and well, and Teach for America that focuses on education for poverty-ridden children, and Teaching Fellows that also focuses on the poor and otherwise disadvantaged, and on and on.  What has he done to support domestic programs like these?

And there’s this bit about Clinton’s and Kaine’s Progressivism, which goes back to the early 20th Century. Here’s what Herb Croly, one of the founders of the Progressive Movement during that early 20th Century period (a movement that was carried forward by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and pushed enthusiastically today by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), had to say about us Americans and about democracy in his The Promise of American Life:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy.

And

…the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Do we really want folks with this level of contempt for Americans and for America in our Federal government?