In a drama- and conflict-filled election season, Hillary Clinton's choice of Tim Kaine as running mate seemed, perhaps, underwhelming. Kaine was portrayed as a centrist, a pragmatist who “dedicated himself to incremental progress in a red-turned-purple state.” Falling just short of selection by Obama in 2007, Kaine offered the Clinton campaign a seemingly safe choice. As a longtime Democratic insider, Kaine was a reliable and, in his own words, “boring” vice presidential selection. In contrast, we contend that Kaine is anything but boring; rather, he provides a fascinating case study of masculine ambivalence in the contemporary political sphere.

Political campaigns are heavily gendered contexts. Prior work in the field of rhetoric demonstrates that presidential campaigns, in particular, offer highly visible gendered spectacles that place cultural tensions relating to gender roles and ideologies on display. However, gender seems only to come to the forefront of national campaigns when something disrupts the normative gendered conventions of the executive office. The US presidency is traditionally a masculine space; contenders for the office have always been required to perform a specific and narrow masculinity to appear presidential. When women appear on the scene, the stability of patriarchal constructions is called into question and debated in a range of public contexts. Prior scholars have illustrated the ways in which Geraldine Ferraro, Sarah Palin, and of course, Hillary Clinton spurred such debate. In 2016 dynamics of gender disruption were evident as the public, media, and the candidates themselves seemed intent on centering gender discourses. The most prominent of these stemmed from conflict between Clinton and Bernie Sanders during the primary contest, and Clinton and Donald Trump during the general. The importance of such conflicts should not be understated; yet, these are not the only gendered disruptions to emerge from this election cycle.

Indeed, such obvious gender rhetorics may obscure other significant discourses. The gendered rhetoric of Tim Kaine, for example, may seem insignificant when compared to the aggressive masculinity displayed by Trump and the persistent gendered double-binds publicly navigated by Clinton. However, we contend that relatively mundane constructions of masculinity reflected in Kaine provide subtle yet powerful insight into the complexity of contemporary political gender roles.