For Kaine, a Faith in Service

Being around the Holton family transformed politics from a television experience to real life for Kaine. "I think, probably, that being around my dad and my family added to his understanding that politicians are just normal people," Anne Holton said. "Most people think that politicians are sort of different. I grew up around them and so I don't think that way about presidents or governors. They are just normal people, and my dad certainly gave him a sense of that."

Kaine and Holton decided to raise their children Catholic. Holton said she did not convert to Catholicism because she does not agree with the church's stand on women's issues, but she said she has attended St. Elizabeth's Church, a predominantly black Catholic church in Richmond, with her husband and children, Nat, 15, Woody, 13, and Annella, 10, for a decade and a half.

Practicing Law

Kaine settled into a small firm, and his first case was a civil rights suit in which a black woman had been denied an apartment because of her race. Kaine won it.

He continued to represent clients who were denied housing because of their race, as well as small-town governments and inmates on death row.

Kaine said his death penalty work was a small part of his law practice and not something he solicited. He said he was the primary attorney on two death penalty appeals, and both times he was appointed by the court.

"Twice in 17 years of law practice I have been asked by the courts to provide legal representation for habeas corpus appeal," Kaine said. "One other time, a junior attorney in my firm was court-appointed to a habeas corpus appeal and asked for my advice. Attorneys are required by our oaths not to decline cases simply because they are unpopular."

Kaine was appointed to appeal the death sentence of Richard Lee Whitley, who had cut the throat of his Fairfax County neighbor and then sexually assaulted her. He based his unsuccessful appeals on arguments that Whitley, who had an IQ of 75, was "insane" or "feebleminded" and should have been committed to a state hospital.

As Kaine awaited Whitley's electrocution in Richmond in July 1987, he told The Washington Post that "murder is wrong in the gulag, in Afghanistan, in Soweto, in the mountains of Guatemala, in Fairfax County . . . and even the Spring Street Penitentiary."

Entering Politics

Kaine said he began thinking about running for the Richmond City Council after he noticed that council members would often divide on issues along racial lines. "I'd be at meetings where the white members would go to one corner of the room to talk about things when an important issue came up and black members would go to another corner. I thought I could be a bridge builder."

He had often heard his father-in-law talk often about how people with good backgrounds and educations should think about running for office, but when he told the former governor that he was going to run for city council the response he got was this: "What in the hell would you want to do something like that?"

Kaine won his first political race and has not lost since.

On the council in the 1990s, he worked to build schools and bring the homicide rate down. Council members elected him twice as Richmond mayor.