Fredericksburg Lance-Star slams Kaine for blindly following Obama

In a completely uncharacteristic move, the left-leaning Fredericksburg Lance-Star really took Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tim Kaine to the wood shed after his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

Their assessment of Kaine's speech? As blogger Tom White noted, they called him out for having his head in the sand by blindly following President Barack Obama:

As for the content of Mr. Kaine’s administration-lauding speech, much of it was sadistically ambushed by new economic data. While Mr. Kaine was boasting that America under Mr. Obama “went from 25 months of job losses to 29 straight months of private-sector job growth,” the Institute for Supply Management, a trade group, said that U.S. manufacturing activity had fallen to its lowest reading in three years; Treasury announced that the national debt had topped $16 trillion; and the Department of Agriculture reported a record number of Americans on food stamps. (The Democratic faithful may be happy that they are breaking camp tomorrow, when new jobless numbers are released.)

Meanwhile, regarding Mr. Kaine’s jubilation that “the auto industry is back,” that news demands a rather fat asterisk. As the Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin recently reported, American taxpayers still own 500 million shares of stock in a bailed-out GM, whose shares are selling for about $20–$34 less than the price at which the government’s investment could merely break even; and to pump up sales, GM is increasingly depending on subprime loans, the sort that did so much for the housing industry.

For a newspaper that regularly tries to emulate the Washington Post in bashing Republicans and protecting the Democrats, that's quite a harsh -- all be it accurate -- assessment of the former Democratic National Committee chairman and former governor who is in the battle of his life against former Republican Governor George Allen.

Ouch.