PERSPECTIVE: Election fallout for Kaine and the Dems

Readying to slink off into the night, Gov. Tim Kaine continues to bustle about the business of securing future employment. He has signed on for a part-time teaching gig at the University of Richmond to be coupled with his work as Democratic National Committee chairman.

His first year in the latter position parallels his last year in that another of nagging inconvenience, governing a state that’s zipping like a penny dropped from a skyscraper toward the pavement, where more red ink already is spilling. Sift through the news and Web pages, video footage, blogs, assorted rants and thick, raw breathiness disgorged under the guise of analysis in the wake of Republicans’ election night romp, and one scarcely finds mention of the fellow at the controls of the suddenly bluer opposition.

Leave it to us then to observe that in Kaine’s maiden run as DNC boss, something is running down the party’s leg, and it isn’t a thrill. So where are the raised eyebrows (aside from Kaine’s)?

A year after Barack Obama glided into the White House on the smooth might of a campaign slicker than an ice-covered mountain road, Democrats staggered into Tuesday like they’d just walked in from a bender. Republicans captured all three Virginia statewide offices by fat margins and snatched the governor’s race in New Jersey, where the state’s last four CEOs all had been Democrats.

Republicans, naturally, seized upon this as reckoning for Obama and his socialist march, culminating, lately at least, with the nationalized health care grab. Kaine’s counterpart, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who evinces the kind of propensity for misspeaking that could make him a vice president someday, raced to perform rhetorical pirouettes, seeking credit for Robert F. McDonnell’s gubernatorial triumph while also seeking to appear deferential.

Nothing is more magical than watching politicians on a night of election carnage. On the winners side, partisan herds form from vapors to claim a part in an outcome over which they had no effect. Turn to the losers, and it’s like the rapture fundamentalists talk about: people have disappeared.

Folks are familiar with this phenomenon regarding Kaine, whose visibility as governor in the last two years has been reduced to the frequency of a lunar eclipse. The question is, should Kaine be cast to the inferno for Democrats’ hellish Tuesday?

We don’t know the answer, but we can’t help but notice the inefficacy that clings to Kaine like moss. The state he periodically governs likely will be several billions of dollars underwater when McDonnell strides into office in January. The party Kaine oversees is in a stupor as it lurches into next year’s mid-term elections after experiencing a vertiginous year-to-year flip in fortunes. A new kind of change is loose.

Somehow, Kaine makes his way round and above it all. But his Democratic shipmates might observe that wherever he happens to be, storms come.