Open up, Citizen Kaine

It’s good to be Timothy M. Kaine these days principally because he’s not Mark Sanford. Virginia’s governor, like his counterpart in South Carolina, gets around, but Kaine, in senses platonic and political. So while South Carolina proceeds with inquiries to determine whether Sanford, the skunk, spent taxpayer cash to pursue l’amour in Argentina, Virginia Republicans have halted nosing into the possible use of state tax money to aid Kaine’s cross-country politicking as Democratic National Committee chairman. C’est la vie.

Or so Kaine tells us.

He has become an especially frequent flyer, gripping coattails in both fists as Barack Obama rockets to the political stratosphere. Where the governor goes, so too does a security detail whose pay, travel and accommodations ordinarily are covered by state taxpayers. While Kaine campaigned, the state’s budget sank waist-deep into the red. Lawmakers felt like kids neglected while dad jet-sets.

But Republicans’ motives are as plain as the guilt on Sanford’s face. Democrats, naturally, point to Jim Gilmore, the former governor and current GOP pariah who served as chairman of the Republican National Committee while in office. A raw skeptic might suggest that Republicans’ attack of sudden curiosity has something to do with this being a gubernatorial election year.

They wanted Kaine to disclose records showing where he traveled and what it cost when he ventured outside the state on his night job as DNC chairman. To this, Kaine provided a predictable answer: You get nothing. Court rulings shield the records as “working papers.” He’s not required to release them. Republicans backed off saying they didn’t want state money to be poured into a legal fight.

Likely, they also sensed the likelihood of legal defeat, and so now the issues goes to the public to either fester and boil or die. Kaine appears to be well within his rights, and there’s nothing to suggest anything untoward in his ventures. But his answers still rest bitter on the palate.

Kaine says that anyone who wants to know where he’s been – the kind of thing lots of people wonder these days with regard to their governors – can simply ask him. Well, gee, didn’t Republicans just do that? Or people can inquire with the DNC or the governor’s political-action committee, Moving Virginia Forward.

Or the governor could include his travels for the DNC on his official schedule. He also could provide expense records even if the law does not mandate as much. If the DNC is footing the travel bill – and he says the committee also will reimburse the state for security costs – why not use transparency to jab a stick into Republicans’ innuendo? Republicans could and should respond in kind by revealing to us the expenses, both to the state and the RNC, of Gilmore’s partisan gallivanting. What’s to hide?

Lines frequently blur between politicians’ acts and duties to parties and their public offices. Sometimes, making partisan connections aids the public good. But if that’s true, then partisan trips as leaders of national committees fall within the public’s right to know, if not legally then in principle. Affording elected officials reasonable privacy should not be construed to mean blocking from view records relating to public business, even if it’s conducted wearing partisan hats.

The wandering governor of South Carolina reminds us not only of the potential for abuses in the absence of scruples and scrutiny but of the fact that elected officials in high office work for the people. Sitting at the highest level of power in one of the 50 states is a public act that continues seamlessly until term’s end. Those who think the burden excessive ought to consider alternatives to public life. Then their travels will be nobody’s business but their own.