Kaine, Clinton, following the example of her husband, brands herself a pragmatist: She has a partner who could actually govern if need be, and who shares her centrist liberalism. He boasts a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood and a grade of F from the NRA, but he did until last week support trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (as did Clinton before Sanders forced her to flip). My own opinion of Kaine is high. Anyone who knows Virginia politics knows that he has been as forceful a progressive as imaginable for a politician who entered public life in Richmond in the mid-1990s. To Sanders dead-enders who view him as the Antichrist, I say I’m with Sarah Silverman: “You’re being ridiculous.”

It’s also worth a moment to note ahistorical footnote to Kaine’s candidacy added by the lineage of his wife, Anne Holton. Holton has had her own distinguished career in public service (most recently as state secretary of education) in Virginia. Her father, Linwood Holton, was Virginia’s Republican governor in the early 1970s. In a famous incident at the time, he responded to court-ordered desegregation not with George Wallace–style defiance but by enrolling his daughters in a historically black public school near the Governor’s Mansion in Richmond. This was a remarkable stand to take in the former capital of the Confederacy — where the previous governor, Mills Godwin, had been a forceful advocate for “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education — but it was consistent with the Grand Old Party of Lincoln. Nonetheless, Holton