Get the Party Started

Maybe he could build a bridge between the Red and the Blue. Build the ranks of a sensible middle.

It was a night of hopes -- one in which those big screens flashed the testimonials of all kinds of Virginians -- young, old, black, Latino, white -- talking about the good life in Old Dominion. You got the feeling at that concert that it was the kind of place where any sign of the old Confederacy, a flag on a T-shirt or cap, might have set off the metal detectors that everyone had to pass through, which they did quietly and patiently, even as the crowds bottle-necked in good-natured chaos entering the arena.

It was a night in which the Hood Temple AME Zion Church Male Chorus could perform an inspiring rendition of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- the song of the Union army -- segue into "America the Beautiful," which spurred the crowd to its feet, and finish with lines from the African American anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

It was then that Kaine was brought onstage by the night's emcee, Rex Ellis, vice president of the Historic Area at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Kaine, who'd come in with his wife and three children shortly before 8 p.m. in his dark suit, white shirt and red tie, had long ago shed his jacket and bounded onto the stage.

To the catalogue of political moves -- the baby kiss, the handshake and simultaneous hand-on-shoulder move, the Clintonian crowd-wave, talking to six people at once -- add the bounding-up-the-stairs move. It is part of the youthful political repertoire of which Kaine is a master.

But Kaine didn't spend a lot of time with political speeches Friday night, moving quickly to introduce the Beach Boys.

Kathy Ford found something hopeful in it all. She'd waited all night to hear her Beach Boys. A petite middle-age woman with a pixie haircut, dark slacks and makeup most skillfully applied, she had sat for much of the night like a statue. Nothing moved. Not when Kaine was on his harmonica with No Speed Limit on "Will the Circle Be Unbroken"; not when gospel singers blew away one song after another; and when time came for the performance of In God's Image, a group of four young African Americans from Richmond, in their baggy shirts and jeans and long gold ropes, Ford's alabaster pose seemed to stiffen.

But after Kaine introduced the Beach Boys, who with a great sense of self-awareness poked fun at themselves and their ages -- they might be better known as the Beach Granddads -- Ford truly came alive. She was on her feet clapping and swaying and bobbing her head.

It was a new day in Virginia, where the old and the new blended. And for a moment, inside that bubble, it was a night and a weekend to believe in such things.