■ 30 June 2009 | 10:46 AM
State Republican chairman Pat Mullins isn't throwing his hands up in defeat after Gov. Timothy M. Kaine refused to release more details about his out-of-state political travels, but he also won't take the governor to court to try to force him to share the information.
instead, Mullins said in a statement this week, Virginia Republicans will monitor the governor's comings and goings as best they can and draw public attention to them.
"We will continued to scour the Internet for news reports from publications across the United States that may catch glimpses of Tim Kaine during his apparently busy political travel schedule," Mullins said.
"Additionally, we are in the process of contacting the Republican Chairmen of the state parties of each of the forty-nine other states to ask them to be on alert for the presence of the Governor of Virginia when he appears at a DNC function in their far flung zip codes," he added.
The Virginia Republican Party recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Kaine's office seeking to learn more about his itinerary as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
He is not the first Virginia governor to hold a leadership role in a national political party in the midst of his term. Former Gov. Jim Gilmore became chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2001, his final year in office.
Kaine was named to the partisan political post earlier this year. At the time, he said his travels as party chairman would be largely restricted to weekends and off-hours. Yet, Mullins said, "it appears that the vast majority of his known trips have occurred during the normal work week."
Among the places Kaine has been spotted recently are North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Illinois.
Kaine has said that he is willing to reveal his travel plans when asked. His office, however, hasn't been so forthcoming. It releases a weekly schedule of his Virginia travels, but does not provide details about his other trips. And administration officials have been reluctant to share much more.
Mullins takes credit for one victory in this saga.
Kaine has pledged to have the DNC reimburse the state for the estimated $10,000 in travel and lodging costs for the State Police troopers assigned to his security detail who have accompanied him on political trips. The Executive Protection Unit travels with the governor wherever he goes, including personal and political trips.
-- Julian Walker
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I don't think the question, hence problem...
is with the travel itself, per se, it's the refusal to divulge that travel. As has been said before, 'it's not the crime, it's the cover up' that begs questions. I remember another utterance from a scandal from the past: "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again" (was that Al Gore?). Anyways, if Gilmore or anyone else has a travel schedule and expenses record, what's the problem? If he doesn't, is that wrong? If it IS wrong, does that thus make Kaine's actions 'legit', i.e., two wrongs do indeed make a right? Or seeing how we're always told that the Republicans are the enemy, from the Dems and the media, is emulating said Republicans thus OK, or should a better standard be applied?
I find these all to be interesting questions, but in reality, not pressing ones. Kaine's a lame duck, after all.
Gilmore's travel schedule?
I guess that before I ascribe this to anything more than political grandstanding, I would like to see Mullins first release a day by day travel schedule and expenses of Governor Jim Gilmore when he was in exactly the same situation. Without that information, I will simply ignore the grandstanding and look for positive solutions to the issues facing this Commonwealth instead of the steady stream of divisivness and invective coming from the state republican party.