Kaine’s past may hurt Hillary’s outreach to blacks

Richmond: Democrat Hillary Clinton’s pick of Tim Kaine as her vice-presidential running mate could hamper her efforts to reach out to African-American voters because of Kaine’s past embrace of crime-fighting strategies that have driven up the US prison population and are unpopular in the black community.

Hillary Clinton and senator Tim Kaine during a rally in Virginia. Reuters

Richmond, July 23

Democrat Hillary Clinton’s pick of Tim Kaine as her vice-presidential running mate could hamper her efforts to reach out to African-American voters because of Kaine’s past embrace of crime-fighting strategies that have driven up the US prison population and are unpopular in the black community.

The now-defunct Project Exile that Kaine backed was so unusual it was championed by Republicans and Democrats alike and by both the top US gun lobby group and gun-control advocates.

But the federal programme launched in 1997 in Richmond, Virginia, was also criticised at the time as a racially biased initiative that condemned young black men to lengthy prison terms.

Clinton has come under fire herself from black activists for her past support for tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s now blamed for a surge in US prison population and heightened tensions between law enforcement and black communities.

One of her fundraisers got disrupted earlier this year by activists who asked her to “apologise for mass incarceration”. Clinton named Kaine as her running mate late on Friday, making what is considered a safe choice for her battle against Republican presidential rival Donald Trump.

As Richmond mayor from 1998 to 2001, Kaine, 58, was a vocal supporter of Project Exile, crediting it with reducing the city’s murder rate.

Its goal was to literally live up to its name by making illegal gun possession a federal, not a state, crime, which allowed prosecutors to send convicted felons, most of them black, to a distant federal penitentiary for at least five years. Sam Sinyangwe, co-founder of Campaign Zero, a group focused on curtailing police violence, said Kaine’s choice could exacerbate Clinton’s problems rallying support of African-Americans, particularly younger people.

“To select somebody like (Kaine) is not a sign of good leadership potential in a president,” Sinyangwe said.

Nicole Lee, a civil-rights lawyer and activist in Washington, DC who is African-American, also expressed concern. “Project Exile broke black families,” she said. “This is not a benign thing to be for. These measures were not used against white kids in the suburbs with guns, they were used against black kids in the cities.”

To defeat Trump in the November 8 presidential election, Clinton needs high turnout among blacks and other minority voters to offset Trump’s popularity among white voters.

During the 1990s, she supported tough-on-crime initiatives backed by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, but now vows to “end the era of mass incarceration”. Her campaign is trying to walk a political tightrope after the killings of two black men by police and the shooting deaths of cops in Texas and Louisiana. — Reuters