Hillary Clinton announces VP pick Tim Kaine on Twitter
The Democratic party's presumptive nominee for president of the United States says via a tweet late Friday that she's picked Sen. Tim Kaine, underscoring the continued importance of social media in the campaign.
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Hillary's pick for VP, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.
In 2008, Barack Obama did it with a text message. Last week, Donald Trump did in it a tweet. Now Hillary Clinton has done it via tech too.
The former secretary of state and presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States took to Twitter late Friday to announce that she's picked Tim Kaine, a US senator from Virginia, as her running mate. The announcement came by way of a tweet at 5:11 p.m. PT.
The announcement about Clinton's vice president pick underscores the importance of social media in the presidential campaign. Everyone running for the office during the past year has used social media services like Twitter and Facebook extensively to reach out to prospective voters.
Trump and Clinton in particular have also used Twitter as a way of disseminating key comments on issues of the day and major announcements, including their VP picks.
Clinton plans to introduce Kaine, a fluent speaker of Spanish, at a rally Saturday at Miami's Florida International University, according to CNN. More than half the student body there is Hispanic. Clinton's rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, has alienated many Latino voters with his talk of building a wall along the border with Mexico and his comments about immigrants and crime. Kaine was the first member of the senate to give an entire speech in Spanish on the Senate floor, CNN reported.
Clinton turned to online commentary site Medium on Friday to offer a more detailed explanation of her pick. "He is a genuinely nice person," she wrote, "but Tim is no one's punching bag. He will fight tooth and nail for American families, and he'll be a dogged fighter in our campaign against Donald Trump and Mike Pence."
Kaine, 58, is the son of a welder, was raised in Kansas, went to Harvard law school, and spent a year as a Catholic missionary in Honduras after his graduation. He was elected governor of Virginia in 2005 and for nearly the last three years has served as a Virginia senator, sitting on both the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees.
His name has already been the source of numerous puns on Twitter, despite the fact that Virginia has already heard all the jokes related to Kaine's name. Among them: "Kaine you dig it," "Kaine buy me love" and "Legalize Kaine-abbis so I can treat the pain of these puns you monsters are inflicting on us."