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Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) wave to the crowd during a campaign rally at Ernst Community Cultural Center in Annandale, Va., on July 14 , 2016 . REUTERS/Carlos BarriaCARLOS BARRIA/Reuters

Hillary Clinton likes her chances as the establishment candidate, up against the most anti-establishment presidential nominee in history, and she's not about to complicate things.

That, as much as anything else, is the obvious message out of her announcement on Friday that Tim Kaine will serve as her running mate.

The 58-year-old Virginia senator is nothing if not a respectable and responsible pick. He is ideologically moderate, well-respected by colleagues and has political executive experience from his time as his state's governor. He was on Barack Obama's vice-presidential shortlist eight years ago, and impressed the vetting team at the time. Aside from his past opposition to abortion, which he has more recently disavowed, there is not much controversial about him, and the prospect of him being a heartbeat from the presidency is not a scary one.

But Mr. Kaine is so blandly safe, so obviously someone with whom Ms. Clinton would naturally have comfort, that his selection brings into yet sharper relief this campaign's battle between the political class and those who wish to tear it down.

In an election year in which Donald Trump steamrolled over a who's who of Republican governors and senators, and she herself struggled to secure the Democratic nomination against a self-described socialist with a tenuous connection to that party, Ms. Clinton was under pressure to choose a running mate who would inject a little populism to her ticket, and make it seem a little less a creature of the Beltway. She certainly had options on that front – and they don't begin and end with Elizabeth Warren, the anticorporate dream candidate of the activist left, who may or may not have been interested in the job anyway.

She could have increased her ticket's blue-collar appeal, especially in the battleground Rust Belt states, with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown – a scrappy free-trade critic who fishes in some of the same voter pools as Mr. Trump, but with a consistently liberal voting record.

She could have tried to energize liberals, and especially Hispanic voters besieged by Mr. Trump's rhetoric, with Labour Secretary Tom Perez, a civil-rights attorney with activist leanings.

She could have looked to Cory Booker, the relatively young African-American first-term senator from New Jersey. Mr. Booker is viewed with suspicion by much of the left, because of Wall Street ties, but stands out from other office-holders because of his unique retail-politics skills.

She could have gone further from the obvious with Al Franken, the former comedian turned Minnesota senator. Mr. Franken has emerged as a surprisingly effective and serious-minded antagonist of Wall Street and champion of various left-of-centre causes; he also still speaks enough like someone from outside politics to break through to regular people in a way Ms. Clinton struggles to do.

Part of the case for Mr. Kaine over those alternatives had to do with geography. Unlike someone such as Mr. Booker or Mr. Perez, he comes from (and carries weight in) a state that will be in play in November. Unlike Mr. Brown, he's not from a state where a Republican governor would get to pick his replacement in the Senate.

But such considerations would easily have been set aside, if Ms. Clinton and her team had identified pushing back against the establishment perceptions as an imperative on the path to the presidency. On the contrary, she seems to be trying to own her political professionalism.

When the current President recently described Ms. Clinton as "the most qualified presidential candidate ever," it sounded a bit like the sort of thing that gets said after someone strong on paper goes down to defeat. But she evidently believes that it's a winning pitch, and that it would be foolish to jeopardize it with someone who doesn't fit traditional views of readiness for the White House.

For the electorate, she may only have brought into even sharper relief what was already obvious.

Most recent elections were fought between left and right. This one, fought between a pragmatic insider and a demagogic outsider with little discernible ideology, is more a question of whether voters want radical or traditional leadership at a time of national and global turbulence. Ms. Clinton has doubled down on career politicians offering more reassurance than the zeitgeist seems to suggest.

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