Kaine calls on Clinton to run in '16 (Dailypress)

Newport News Shipbuilding President Matt Mulherin looks on as Senator Tim Kaine discusses sequestration during a news conference outside of the Huntington Ingalls Industries Bateman Center in February 2013. (Kaitlin McKeown, Daily Press file photo / May 3, 2014)Sen. Tim Kaine, one of the first major politicians to back Barack Obama in the days when his run for the White House seemed little more than a pipe dream, is doing it again – and with another Illinoisan.

He told a South Carolina Women's Democratic Council breakfast that he wants Hillary Clinton to run for president and will support her candidacy if she does.

"She is a classic American optimist with the background and experiences necessary to lead this country in a very complicated world," Kaine told the group. Kaine was in Columbia as the keynote speaker for the annual South Carolina Jefferson Jackson Dinner.

Kaine said he backed Clinton because of her experience as the nation's top diplomat and her "deep history of engagement" on domestic issues ranging from the economy to schools to family issues and civil rights."I'll be starting my fifth year in the Senate on Inauguration Day 2017 and she's the partner I know I'll want to be working with in the White House on all fronts," he said.

"But getting there will still be hard," he added. "If it were easy for women to achieve top leadership spots in this country, Congresswould have more than 18 percent women serving."

Still, it looked like a hard challenge for Obama in 2006.

That was when, two years before the presidential election, "I told my friend, then-Senator Barack Obama, that I would support him if he ran for President of the United States," Kaine said.

At that time, Clinton was the front runner for the Democratic nomination in 2008. But Obama's come from behind campaign galvanized the nation and swept him to the White House as the nation's first African American president.

"I made my decision early because I knew something—he was the right person for the job but getting there would be hard. And I figured that the sooner I started helping him in Virginia, the more helpful I would be." Kaine said.

Virginia was key to Obama's election in 2008, swinging Democratic for only the second time since 1952. As governor, Kaine campaigned hard for Obama. In Kaine's 2012 bid for the Senate, he outpaced Obama slightly and helped keep Republican Mitt Romney from winning Virginia's 13 electoral college votes.

Clinton, who scores miles ahead of any other potential Democratic nominee in recent rolls, with leads of 50 percentage points or more, has not yet said if she will run.

A Political Action Committee, called "Ready for Hillary" has raised more than $5.7 million since it was set up in 2013 by longtime Northern Virginia Clinton supporters Allida Black and Judy Beck.

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