The Washington Post whacks Virginia governor Tim Kaine for spending roughly one and a half weekdays a week on non-state business, running the Democratic National Committee.

Timothy M. Kaine said he has been spending a day and a half of each workweek handling fundraising and policy matters for the Democratic National Committee, a departure from his pledge to conduct most of his national party work by phone and fax and restrict it largely to evenings and weekends while he is governor of Virginia.
When he took the party job, Kaine said he would work part time as DNC chairman from Richmond until January 2010, when his four-year term ends. He said he would conduct DNC business on weekends and in the evenings and rely on aides, computers and phones to monitor party business. He said in November that to do otherwise would not be “consistent with being governor. . . . I would view it as taking my eye too much off the ball about things that need to happen here.”
Since taking the DNC post, Kaine has repeatedly declined to release a schedule of his travels. Through interviews and a review of news reports, The Washington Post found that much of his party work was occurring on weekdays.

What’s kind of striking is that Kaine had to know that the local press and the Virginia GOP would be watching him like a hawk on this matter, and he made all those trips anyway. He had to know it would be an issue and his absence would irk some Virginians, but it just didn’t matter enough to find alternatives.

Kaine is limited to one term, and his successor gets sworn in next January, so I guess we’re seeing a bit of the “senioritis” we were warned about in high school. Or to paraphrase Cosmo Kramer, in his mind, he’s already gone.