Tim Kaine, A Mizzou Grad, Roots For The Kansas Jayhawks

Diana Moskovitz|published: Fri 22nd July, 22:49 2016

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In a more perfect world, our national leaders would be judged by the content of their character, the way their strong wills contest against their empathy in difficult situations, and their willingness to do what was right as opposed to what would get them re-elected. But that’s just the plot of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, so let’s talk about how they really get judged: On looks, on folksiness, on if they seem like fun guys at happy hour.

Personally, I’m having a hard time believing newly minted Democratic Party VP candidate Tim Kaine would be able to hold his own at the local happy hour with such sports treason as this:

Kansas-Missouri is frequently cited as one of the fiercest rivalries in all of sports because, like the best sports rivalries, it’s actually about so much more than sports. Dubbed the Border War, it reaches back to the Civil War, when Missouri and Kansas literally went to brutal, bloody war with each other. Kaine seems completely nonplussed by this. From the mentioned in that tweet:

The Virginia governor grew up in Overland Park, Kan., and is an avowed Jayhawks fan. Back in 2005, he called them his favorite team. But not, as it turns out, on the gridiron.

“I root for the Jayhawks in basketball,” Kaine told us yesterday. “I’ve never been a KU football fan.”

Let me interject here to say that Kansas is historically weak in football, which makes our man Kaine a significant opportunist. (“Oh, I only root for Kansas in the sport it’s good at!”) It gets worse:

Parsing the nuances of team loyalty, Kaine explained that his parents were “K-Staters” (Kansas State U) and he graduated from the University of Missouri, which meant he was usually rooting against rival KU.

So he roots for the school that is the fiercest rival of his alma mater and where his parents attended. This is worse than when Carly Fiorina pandered to Iowa voters by abandoning her alma mater in the Rose Bowl to pull for the Hawkeyes (and that didn’t work out for her). This might rank up there with when John Kerry asked for Swiss cheese on his Philly cheesesteak (and that didn’t work out for him either). The Democrats might be screwed.