Kaine: "We're Not Panicked People"
DNC chair Tim Kaine will not heed a prominent Dem's call to step down, vowing to press on as head of the party's national committee in the face of a difficult political terrain.
"If you're in a leadership position, you're going to have your critics," Kaine said on a conference call with reporters. "I've been in elected office for 17 years, so I know the game. No, I'm proud of what we're doing. We're governing and we're engaged in politics in a very tough time. We knew that going in."
Last week, ex-VA Gov./ex-Richmond Mayor Doug Wilder (D) said Kaine was serving in the wrong position and should be replaced, as part of a larger replacement of Pres. Obama's political team.
"I am an admirer of Tim Kaine," Wilder wrote in an op-ed in Politico. "But a spate of recent losses in races that Democrats should have won underscores what has been obvious to me for a long time: The chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee is the wrong job for him."
Kaine acknowledged electoral difficulties, but he pointed to other successes -- winning 2 GOP-held House seats, robust fundraising and an unprecedented field program among them -- during his tenure.
"We've been able to do very solid work on the fundraising side, near-historic in a non-president year at the DNC, and we've put together the largest field organization to help our 2010 candidates through Organizing for America that we've ever had in a non-presidential year. We won a lot of races in the early part of '09, and hey, in the 2 governors races and Massachusetts, things didn't go our way," Kaine said.
"We know it's going to be a challenging and tough cycle, historically it normally is. But we're not panicked people, and when a couple of races don't go our way, you know, we don't panic. If we would, we never would have won the White House in '08," he added. "We think we've got a good plan and we've got a lot of people who are very energized about it. Critics will say what they want but we're going to keep plowing."
Kaine used the conference call to tout the one-year anniversary of the economic stimulus bill, and to criticize GOPers who have castigated the measure while publicly claiming credit for money it sent to their districts. Kaine's call is the latest in a series of Dem efforts to own the stimulus, from the Obama admin sending top surrogates to 3 dozen events this week to House Dems holding their own in-district events to tout economic progress.
DNC chair Tim Kaine is in serious denial. I'm a Massachusetts Independent and I voted for Scott Brown for the same reason that I will vote for ANYONE but a Democrat. As soon as the Dems get rid of negative, Head-in-the-Sand, partisan, nothing but Blame-it-all-on-Bush, party leaders like Kaine, Pelosi & Reid, THEN I'll go back to voting Democratic. Just throw them all out and start over. That's my motto...
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