UPDATE: On Fri­day night, Hillary Clin­ton announced that she had in fact select­ed Vir­ginia sen­a­tor Tim Kaine as her vice pres­i­den­tial run­ning mate.

While there are many other reasons a Kaine pick would signal a less-than-secure and values-driven Clinton presidency, the fact also stands that he is a white male insider at a time when the rising electorate is decidedly not white and quite clearly looking for strong leadership and meaningful change. Kaine is not the change we seek.

This sto­ry first appearead at Rewire.

Dur­ing the 2016 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, for­mer sec­re­tary of state and pre­sump­tive Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton has fre­quent­ly claimed to be a pro­gres­sive, though she often adds the unnec­es­sary and bewil­der­ing caveat that she’s a ​“pro­gres­sive who likes to get things done.” I’ve nev­er been sure what that is sup­posed to mean, except as a pos­si­ble pre­lude to or excuse for giv­ing up pro­gres­sive val­ues to seal some unknown deal in the future; as a way of excus­ing her­self from fight­ing for major changes after she is elect­ed; or as a way of say­ing pro­gres­sives are only impor­tant to her cam­paign until after they leave the vot­ing booth.

One of the first sig­nals of whether Clin­ton actu­al­ly believes in a pro­gres­sive agen­da will be her choice of run­ning mate. Reports are that Sen. Tim Kaine, for­mer Vir­ginia gov­er­nor, is the top choice. The selec­tion of Kaine would be the first sig­nal that Clin­ton intends to seek pro­gres­sive votes but ignore pro­gres­sive val­ues and goals, like­ly at her per­il, and ours.

We’ve seen this hap­pen before. In 2008, then-pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Barack Oba­ma claimed to be a pro­gres­sive. By virtue of hav­ing a vision for and promise of real change in gov­ern­ment and soci­ety, and by espous­ing trans­paren­cy and respon­si­bil­i­ty, he won by a land­slide. In fact, Oba­ma even called on his sup­port­ers, includ­ing the mil­lions acti­vat­ed by the campaign’s Orga­niz­ing for Action (OFA), to keep him account­able through­out his term. Imme­di­ate­ly after the elec­tion, how­ev­er, ​“pro­gres­sives” were out and the right wing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty was ​“in.”

Obama’s cab­i­net mem­bers in both for­eign pol­i­cy and the econ­o­my, for exam­ple, were drawn from the cen­ter and cen­ter-right of the par­ty, leav­ing many pro­gres­sives, as Moth­er Jones’ David Corn wrote in the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2009, ​“dis­ap­point­ed, irri­tat­ed or fit to be tied.” Oba­ma chose Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, a man with a rep­u­ta­tion from the days of Bill Clinton’s White House for a reluc­tance to move bold poli­cies — lest they upset Wall Street or con­ser­v­a­tive Democ­rats — and a deep dis­dain for pro­gres­sives. With Emanuel as gate­keep­er of poli­cies and Valerie Jar­rett con­sumed with the ​“Oba­ma Brand” (what­ev­er that is), the White House sud­den­ly saw ​“pro­gres­sives” as the problem.

It became clear that instead of ​“the change we were hop­ing for,” Oba­ma had start­ed on an impos­si­ble quest to ​“coop­er­ate” and ​“com­pro­mise” on bad poli­cies with the very par­ty that set out to destroy him before he was even sworn in. Oba­ma and Emanuel pre­empt­ed efforts to push for a pub­lic option for health-care reform, despite very high pub­lic sup­port at the time. Like­wise, the White House failed to push for oth­er pro­gres­sive poli­cies that would have been a slam dunk, such as the Employ­ee Free Choice Act, a major goal of the labor move­ment that would have made it eas­i­er to enroll work­ers in unions. With a 60-vote Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­ate major­i­ty, this pro­gres­sive leg­is­la­tion could eas­i­ly have passed. Instead, the White House worked to sup­port con­ser­v­a­tive Demo­c­rat then-Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s efforts to kill it, and even sent Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden to Arkansas to cam­paign for her in her run for re-elec­tion. She lost anyway.

They also allowed con­ser­v­a­tives to shelve plans for an aggres­sive stim­u­lus pack­age in favor of a much weak­er one, for the sole sake of ​“bipar­ti­san­ship,” a move that many econ­o­mists have since crit­i­cized for not doing enough. As I wrote years ago, these deci­sions were not only deeply dis­ap­point­ing on a fun­da­men­tal lev­el to those of us who’d put heart and soul into the Oba­ma cam­paign, but also, I per­son­al­ly believe, one of the main rea­sons Oba­ma lat­er lost the midterms and had a hard time gov­ern­ing. He was not elect­ed to imple­ment GOP-lite, and there was no ​“there, there” for the change that was promised. Many peo­ple deeply devot­ed to mak­ing this coun­try bet­ter for work­ing peo­ple became fed up.

Stand­ing up for pro­gres­sive prin­ci­ples is not so hard, if you actu­al­ly believe in them. Sen. Eliz­a­beth War­ren (D- MA) is a pro­gres­sive who actu­al­ly puts her prin­ci­ples into action, like the cre­ation against all odds in 2011 of the Con­sumer Finance Pro­tec­tion Bureau, per­haps the sin­gle most impor­tant pro­gres­sive achieve­ment of the past 20 years. Among oth­er things, the CFPB shields con­sumers from the excess­es of mort­gage lenders, stu­dent loan ser­vicers, and cred­it card com­pa­nies that have caused so much eco­nom­ic chaos in the past decade. So unless you are more inter­est­ed in pro­tect­ing the sta­tus quo than address­ing the root caus­es of the many prob­lems we now face, a pro­gres­sive politi­cian would want a strong pro­gres­sive run­ning mate.

By choos­ing Tim Kaine as her vice pres­i­dent, Clin­ton will sig­nal that she val­ues pro­gres­sives in name and vote only.

As Zach Carter wrote in the Huff­in­g­ton Post, Kaine is ​“set­ting him­self up as a fig­ure will­ing to do bat­tle with the pro­gres­sive wing of the par­ty.” Kaine is in favor of the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship (TPP), a trade agree­ment large­ly nego­ti­at­ed in secret and by cor­po­rate lob­by­ists. Both Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose vot­ers Clin­ton needs to win over, and Sen. Eliz­a­beth War­ren oppose the TPP because, in Warren’s words, it ​“would tilt the play­ing field even more in favor of … big multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions and against work­ing families.”

The pro­gres­sive agen­da includes strong empha­sis on effec­tive sys­tems of gov­er­nance and over­sight of banks and finan­cial insti­tu­tions — the actors respon­si­ble, as a result of dereg­u­la­tion, for the major finan­cial crises of the past 16 years, cost­ing the Unit­ed States tril­lions of dol­lars and gut­ting the finan­cial secu­ri­ty of many mid­dle-class and low-income people.

As War­ren has stat­ed:

Wash­ing­ton turned a blind eye as risks were pack­aged and re-pack­aged, mag­ni­fied, and then sold to unsus­pect­ing pen­sion funds, munic­i­pal gov­ern­ments, and many oth­ers who believed the mar­kets were hon­est. Not long after the cops were blind­fold­ed and the big banks were turned loose, the worst crash since the 1930s hit the Amer­i­can econ­o­my — a crash that the Dal­las Fed esti­mates has cost a col­lec­tive $14 tril­lion. The moral of this sto­ry is sim­ple: With­out basic gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion, finan­cial mar­kets don’t work. That’s worth repeat­ing: With­out some basic rules and account­abil­i­ty, finan­cial mar­kets don’t work. Peo­ple get ripped off, risk-tak­ing explodes, and the mar­kets blow up. That’s just an empir­i­cal fact — clear­ly observ­able in 1929 and again in 2008. The point is worth repeat­ing because, for too long, the oppo­nents of finan­cial reform have cast this debate as an argu­ment between the pro-reg­u­la­tion camp and the pro-mar­ket camp, gen­er­al­ly putting Democ­rats in the first camp and Repub­li­cans in the sec­ond. But that so-called choice gets it wrong. Rules are not the ene­my of mar­kets. Rules are a nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent for healthy mar­kets, for mar­kets that cre­ate com­pe­ti­tion and inno­va­tion. And rolling back the rules or fir­ing the cops can be pro­found­ly anti-market.