Just this week the Virgina House rejected his nominee to be Secretary of the Commonwealth (Virginia's past head of the AFL-CIO Danny LeBlanc) and here's what Kaine said:

"I am saddened that the House leadership has chosen the Washington style path of partisanship by rejecting a good and capable man...The Secretary of the Commonwealth has no - I repeat, no - role in the enforcement of Virginia's right-to-work law, a law I strongly support."

I added the emphasis. I could see a guy making a statement--though I still think it would be a sad comment--that he would enforce the laws of Virginia, which includes right-to-work. But to say publicly he STRONGLY SUPPORTS anti-union laws is unacceptable.

via Kathy G is my source for anti-Kaine discussion, but I wanted to point this out because it really is egregious.  I know that Democrats in conservative areas have to speak in certain ways to communicate and work with their constituencies and the various elites in their areas, and that this leads to some inevitable friction.  But there are certain principles you don't compromise or else getting Democrats in office becomes irrelevant.  Supporting Right to Work laws which make it impossible to organize a union is one of them.  It's just not ok for workers to have no opportunity to stand up for themselves against abusive labor practices; someone like Kaine shouldn't just be off the table, he should be toxic."

And Howie Klein at DownwithTyranny in his post, "Who Will Pick A Worse Running Mate, Obama Or McCain?" writes the following: " All the Obama running mate trial balloons or rumors being bandied about in the media sound absolutely horrible: Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh... I voted, much to my eternal sorrow, for Gore-Lieberman. That'll never happen again. If Obama picks some right-wing bigot like Kaine or Bayh or a corporate shill like Biden or Bayh or Kaine... well, I live in California and he doesn't need me to win this state's electoral votes anyway. Glenn Hurowitz already painted a picture yesterday of the disintegration of hope as Obama takes on the role of defensive jello. 

To most voters, campaigns are not an egghead mental Olympics between two walking policy platforms. They're primal battles that test how candidates respond under fire. And for the last several weeks, Obama has been failing that test: crying about McCain's attacks and then surrendering. To most voters, this sends a simple message: if Obama can't stand up to a babbling incompetent like John McCain, how is he ever going to stand up to the oil executives, the health care lobby, or, for that matter, Osama bin Laden?

"If the media is to believed, Obama is veering way to the right of the Democratic Party-- or even over to the Republican Party-- to look for a running mate. A running mate is not just a strategic move to help win the election. It's also someone who could become president at any time. Tim Kaine? I have a recollection that the first thing he did when he got into office was sign some anti-gay bill. If Obama wants to make the case that women need to turn out for him in big numbers, an anti-choice throw-back like Kaine is the wrong move.

"Evan Bayh is just as putrid a choice. There are only 2 Democratic senators who vote more frequently for the Bush agenda than Bayh: Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Tim Johnson of South Dakota. Bayh is a worse voter than Lieberman or than Dixiecrats Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. His record shows he's barely more trustworthy than your garden variety Republican. Biden, a notorious corporate shill, is positively liberal compared to Bayh-- or Obama. It amazes me that Obama immediately runs to the right to make his first important decision. Everyone I know likes the idea of Wes Clark. But compared to the tragic choices we keep reading about in the newspapers, Hillary looks better and better with every passing day.  

"McCain, of course, is Obama's most constant saving grace-- although I suspect that most of the brilliant electorate who gave us 8 years of Bush-Cheney will be easily fooled again and eager to find an excuse to vote for the white man. Unlike Obama fleeing in disarray from his party's base, McCain seems to be, at least today, going right for the heart of his: Eric Cantor (R-VA), one of the most radical right extremists in the history of Congress. His voting record is beyond description. I've never seen so many zeros in my life. There isn't a single issue he isn't at the very bottom of the barrel on, right down there with the lunatic fringe-- Dan Burton (R-IN), Steve King (R-IA), Lynn Westmoreland(KKK-GA), Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)... He's actually worse than sociopaths like Roy Blunt (R-MO), John Kline (R-MN), Michele Bachmann (R-MN),Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH), Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)... you getting the picture? He is beloved of the furthest right Republican propagandists and would do McCain tremendous good among the 10% of the GOP further right than Benito Mussolini."

Glenn Hurowitz at Huffington Post has some advice for Obama that he should heed.  Here are some highlights: "Newsflash, Obama: To most voters, campaigns are not an egghead mental Olympics between two walking policy platforms. They're primal battles that test how candidates respond under fire. And for the last several weeks, Obama has been failing that test: crying about McCain's attacks and then surrendering. To most voters, this sends a simple message: if Obama can't stand up to a babbling incompetent like John McCain, how is he ever going to stand up to the oil executives, the health care lobby, or, for that matter, Osama bin Laden?

"The good news is that we've been here before, and Obama has shown a capacity to emerge from his fetal crouch, stop spewing only rhetorical rainbows and daisies, and start throwing some lethal punches of his own. In the summer of 2007, Obama was riding all his inspiring hopes and dreams to...a 23 point deficit in the national polls. After being encouraged by Arianna Huffington, Isaiah Wilner and others to "start running for President of the United States instead of class president," he did just that and launched some effective, hard-hitting attacks on Hillary's voting record and her ties to corporate lobbyists. It was the critical moment of the 2007 campaign when Obama effectively upended Hillary's inevitability narrative and regained momentum.

"So what's Obama to do? First, he has to untie his hand from around his back and start dedicating a lot more resources to defining McCain (for some reason, the Obama campaign seems to have bought into the McCain campaign's plan to make this election purely about Obama, under the crazy miscalculation that people have unshakeable opinions about McCain, despite the wild swings in his policies, his poll numbers, and the relative paucity of media coverage he gets). Second, Obama needs a running mate with the toughness to go on the offense, not some blander version of Obama's confrontation-wary self. That means someone like Wesley Clark, John Edwards, Jack Reed,Brian Schweitzer, or even Hillary Clinton, not some lily-livered, lobbyist-friendly, uninspiring non-entity like Tim Kaine.

"Finally, Obama can't afford to repeat the Democrats' 2004 mistake of trying to run a positive convention, of which the Democrats were very proud, but which produced only a two percent bump in the polls, about 1/5th the minimum bump parties usually get. The Republicans responded to the Democrats' smiley hug-fest with their usual political napalm (remember Zell Miller?). And they got what no pundit thought possible - a 10 point jump in the polls (a triumph bested only by the Democrats' own 1992 convention in which speaker after speaker (including then Democrat Zell Miller) lustily trashed George Bush Sr.'s myriad failures.

"Even more in 2008 than 2004, people in America are angry. They want and need a president who can at least occasionally channel their frustration, not someone so besotted by his own Platonic ideal of politics that he lacks the gumption to fight hard for himself or the American people. Obama has proven in the past that he has the ability to get his head out of the clouds and down onto the ground where elections are actually decided - and show he has the capacity to be the strong leader Americans want - but we need him there fast, before Team Bush/McCain's savvy and his own diffidence cause another surrender - and another Democratic defeat."