captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for saturday, july 23: hillary's choice. the clinton-kaine ticket makes its debut on the political stage, in florida. first lady, senator, and secretary of state: a closer look at hillary clinton's public record. and the latest on the investigation of yesterday's mass shooting, in munich, germany. next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the john and helen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual

and group retirement products. that's why we are your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thanks for joining us. two days before the party's national convention begins in philadelphia, a preview of the democratic ticket played out today in miami. presumptive presidential nominee hillary clinton introduced her running mate for vice president, tim kaine, the u.s. senator from virginia. hillary clinton began by taking aim at the rhetoric heard at this week's republican national convention. >> donald trump may think america is in decline, but he's wrong. america's best days are still ahead of us. >> sreenivasan: she said the democratic convention would

focus on building bridges, not walls, embracing diversity, and criticized trump's approach to problem solving. >> and when he says, as he did say, "i alone" can fix it, he's not only wrong, he's dangerously wrong. >> sreenivasan: clinton described tim kaine as a leader who cares more about making a difference than making headlines, and as someone with a backbone of steel, citing his push to ban guns for the mentally ill following the 2007 virginia tech mass shooting. speaking in florida, a state where one out of four residents is latino, kaine called for an easier path to citizenship for immigrants and frequently showed off his bilingual skills. >> bienvenidos a todos en nuestra país. verdad? >> sreenivasan: kaine is 58 years old. he is in his first term as a senator from virginia after serving as the state's governor and the mayor of richmond. he's never lost an election.

the son of an ironworker, he would be the nation's second catholic vice president, after joe biden. contrasting the nominees, kaine said clinton does not trash our allies but respects them. >> trump saying he would leave our allies at the mercy of an increasingly aggressive russia. and folks, that's an open invitation for vladimir putin to roll on in. even republicans say that's terribly dangerous. >> sreenivasan: he also criticized trump's business record. >> from atlantic city to his so- called university, he leaves a trail of broken promises and wrecked lives wherever he goes. >> sreenivasan: susan swecker, the head of virginia's delegation to the democratic convention, has known kaine for 20 years. >> he is a very genuine person, but also a very strong person, and someone that has a wealth of experience. a person of integrity. >> sreenivasan: california delegate deborah broner said she

was excited by the pick. >> his experience as an attorney with civil rights issues are important to all of us as democrats and as americans. i believe that his early education leadership in virginia will be essential and complementary to hillary clinton and her presidency. >> sreenivasan: but chuck pascal, a pennsylvania delegate for bernie sanders, said he had hoped for someone else. >> i've been hearing a lot of push back from the progressive side, mainly because he doesn't excite any particular part of the base, and his record has been mixed in some things like trade. >> sreenivasan: for more analysis of the kaine pick, i am joined from philadelphia by newshour weekend special correspondent jeff greenfield. jeff, why tim kaine? how does he help hillary clinton? >> well, it's a choice that actually many people had predicted because it was-- if nothing else, it was a way of communicating that hillary clinton, as she said, has a reasonableness gene.

mayor, lieutenant governor, governor, senator. the reverse of a donald trump with no experience. i think what maybe not many people expected was that the roll-out today showed a tim kaine that very few of us knew-- really good on his feet, very warm, very moving, very funny, speaking without notes fair great length of time. so i think after he appeared, there were more people who said, "oh, i see why she picked him." >> sreenivasan: and there was a different vibe in that roll-out speech as well. donald trump got a lot of criticism for the fact that he didn't even stay on stage very long with mike pence. >> yeah, i think-- i think part of what they were trying to communicate was this is a comfortable two-some. she's not upstaging him. she's perfectly happy to sit there and let him talk at 48 length to let him sphwriews himself to the american public. but i also think the way tim kaine told all those stories-- you know that he subject his kids to the same integrate schools that his wife's father, republican governor, had integrated. what in any event to be in

honduras. what it meant to be the governor during the virginia tech murders. yeah, i think she was saying to the country, "i really am comfortable with who i picked, and you're going to be comfortable afterwards." exi also think a number of people who wanted to see a more liberal or progressive candidate may have had second thoughts after hearing kaine thinking i get this pick. >> sreenivasan: this wasn't someone bernie sanders' folks had supported before or after the speech. >> that's right. but i think there is a comfortable level they may have reached because a lot of what tim kaine was communicating were progressive values. a lot of people think the clintons are grudge holders. in 2008, at a critical point in the primary, tim kaine endorsed barack obama, and this at least shows that, you know, hillary clinton does not walk around for eight years thinking, well he didn't back me. why should i pick him? >> sreenivasan: you know, he was an early supporter of hillary clinton before she even declared. i think it was in 2014 when he

started out. the fact he was speaking spanish in and out of this conversation, the fact that they chose to do this in florida, a key battleground state, important? >> yeah, i would say that does not come under the heading of "coincidence." i've seen of one of trump's supporters complain about this-- why are you speaking spanish when you're running for vice president of the united states. but i think it's pretty clear, given how this campaign is going to shape up, the clear drive on the part of the clinton people to make demographics work for them and try to get a hispanic vote out. hispanics represent an increasing part of the ey have not voted in anything like their numbers of citizens. so i think him campaigning in florida, speaking very comfortably in spanish, i have a feeling you're going to see a lot of of that as the campaign goes on in arizona, colorado, new mexico is a safe democratic state now. but, yeah, that's clearly an asset that they see they're going to play. >> sreenivasan: how about the importance of the electoral map? he's the virginian, and he is

a-- you know, he's somebody who has worked across party lines in virginia, and hopefully i imagine that hillary clinton campaign thinks can deliver that state. >> it's possible. we haven't seen much of that in recent years. vice presidential candidates picked because of geography. and there's some academic skepticism about how much that ever works. but surely, you're talking about a man elected to statewide office there three times in a state that used to be one of the most republicans, gone democratic the last two elections. and if clinton can keep virginia in her column, that makes the path for donald trump just that much more harder. >> sreenivasan: all right, jeff greenfield joining us from philadelphia. thanks so much. >> thank you. >> sreenivasan: hillary clinton has spent roughly half of her nearly 69 years in public life, as first lady of arkansas, and of the united states. as a u.s. senator from new york,

and as secretary of state. but fairly or unfairly, the whiff of scandal has lingered over her white house run-- from the clintons' investment in the whitewater real estate deal in arkansas, to the more recent f.b.i. probe of her use of private email server while secretary of state. opinion polls reflect that clinton is, like her republican opponent, donald trump, a polarizing figure-- on one hand, she has topped the gallup poll of "most admired woman" each of the last 14 years and 20 times overall. on the other hand, a "real clear politics" average of polls finds 56 percent of americans have an unfavorable view of her, and 67% of americans told a "cbs news/ new york times" poll this month they do not find her honest or trustworthy. to examine her record of service as first lady, senator, and secretary of state, i sat down this week with the authors of two books about her. michael tomasky wrote "hillary's turn: inside her improbable, victorious senate campaign." he's now is a correspondent fo""

the daily beast." and mark landler wrote "alter egos: hillary clinton, barack obama and the twilight struggle over american power." he's a "new york times" white house correspondent. >> sreenivasan: back in 1992, bill clinton said, "you're going to get two for the price of one." she's going to be part of my policies. and she was head of the health care reform task force; it didn't do well in congress. what's her lasting legacy from that era? >> she was the first professional first lady, the first feminist first lady, the first first lady from the '60s generation, the first first lady who was the breadwinner in the family. a lot of america liked and admired that. other parts of america found that unappetizing, and even kind of threatening. and so she became a flashpoint simply for who she was. >> sreenivasan: picking up on that women's rights theme, one of the things that she did was in '95, she famously spoke out. >> it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.

>> if you remember, it was right after the health care debacle. so she goes to beijing, delivers this-- by all accounts, just fervent speech, and even to this day, many years later, it's probably in the top five, if not the top three speeches she's ever delivered. and it also really was the speech that catapulted her onto the global stage and kind of set the stage for the next chapter of her career, which was as a sort of a global figure, a global stateswoman. >> sreenivasan: after bill clinton's presidency, after he's impeached in '99, hillary clinton decides to run in a state she does not live in, something that her opponents picked up very quickly, labeling her the carpetbagger. how did she win with those odds stacked against her? >> four days after the 1998 election, pat moynihan, the long-time revered new york senator, announced that he was going to retire. he was up for reelection in 2000. and new york democrats were casting about, who are we going

to run? because the republicans had rudy giuliani and george pataki, at the time both quite formidable figures. and the democrats didn't really have anyone of that stature. so they approached her and said, "why don't you consider doing this?" and at first she said, "what are you talking about, i'm not a new yorker." how she finally did it? perseverance and steady, you know, somewhat boring stick-to- it-iveness. she just kept her head down and went and gave her speech about the issues, and ultimately she won over people, won their respect. >> sreenivasan: if you had to compress her legislative achievements in the senate, what would those be? >> she was in the senate for eight years. she had a part in a number of pieces of legislation, and of course she was the senator from new york when 9/11 happened, so she and chuck schumer were by all accounts that i know of, very active in helping first responders and other victims of the 9/11 attack. so i think she would probably

point to that as a high point, a few things she did on education. there is no big legislation that bears her name, and that's true of a lot of senators. >> she really transformed herself into a national security expert. you know, she decided to join the senate armed services committee, and she became a real military wonk. she was famous for going to every subcommittee hearing and methodically questioning every lieutenant colonel from the pentagon about defense procurement or selective service benefits. so that's where she really began to carve out and hone this reputation as a hawk, that i think has followed her through the secretary of state years and then into the presidential campaign. >> we'd be remiss not to note her iraq war vote. >> of course. >> which she cast probably because she had her eye on the presidency. and so that one has hung around her neck and not stood the test of time. >> sreenivasan: more for

political calculation than for whether or not she felt like troops should be there? >> well, her defense has always been that she voted for authorization as a way to pressure saddam hussein to come clean on the weapons of mass destruction, but that turned out not to have existed. but it's probably not a coincidence that she and john kerry and john edwards, all three who were looking at the presidency, voted for that war. >> and if you then go through her record as secretary of state, whether it was the troop surge in afghanistan, the military intervention in libya, the debate over arming the rebels in syria, she fairly generally came down on the hawkish end of the spectrum. now there's been a continuing debate over whether she does that because it's borne of principle or whether she does that for political calculation, and i think as with everything with hillary clinton, it's probably some complicated mixture of the two. but i think that there's no question that she has generally been more comfortable with exercising military power to advance american interests,

certainly than the president she served as secretary of state. >> sreenivasan: she was also pretty instrumental in driving the obama administration into the coalition in libya. president obama and hillary clinton are getting an earful of blame. there was almost an entire night devoted to her, and chris christie even essentially prosecuted her fictitiously on stage. how much of the decisions of the administration can be attributed to the impact that hillary clinton had on barack obama? >> i think the libya decision, she was an important voice, perhaps the important voice in turning around the president. he was extremely skeptical about going into libya, as honestly was she at the very beginning. she, through her diplomatic travels, was persuaded that it could be done with a broad coalition, and that it was worth doing. if you look at other ones though, for example syria, she and general petraeus, who was then head of the c.i.a., argued

fairly fervently for arming the rebels. and they were turned down when they made their pitch. the president later came around to the idea in sort of a half- hearted way and ended up sending a small number of weapons to the rebels. i mean, the relationship with russia, the iran nuclear negotiation-- these are areas where president obama played a very strong role himself, and her battle was less to win the debate than to carve out some territory in those issues for herself. >> sreenivasan: in the context of libya, benghazi is the word that the republicans have clung onto for really the past couple of years, hung it around her neck and said that she is solely responsible. literally we've seen the mother of one of the soldiers that were killed there, speaking at the republican national convention. sort of two questions-- why are republicans still talking about it, and two, what is she responsible for? >> i'm sure on some level, many republicans are generally aghast at the loss of life there, but she's genuinely aghast at that

loss of life too. she was a friend of chris stevens, a good friend of chris stevens. so i think they're doing it largely to tarnish her politically. and there have been numerous investigations of it, none of which has ever placed any particular culpability right at her door. >> i think the bigger issue for her, frankly, is to talk about libya more broadly. what did go wrong in libya, what real lesson should we learn from what was by all accounts a misbegotten intervention, and if she were president and faced a similar decision, how would she think of it differently, how would she act differently, how can americans solve this whole question of intervention? we either seem to intervene in too gigantic a way, as we did in iraq, or we don't intervene adequately enough, and allow a situation to fall into a mayhem as we did in libya. so i think those are the substantive issues that i think she'll have to contend within the general election debate.

>> sreenivasan: where does she walk lockstep with the president, and where has she broken with him? >> there are certain positions that she has had to take that she has not taken in that past that are opposite of obama or against obama, because of this movement of the democratic party to a populist left economic posture that bernie sanders represents. so the most obvious thing i'm talking about here is trade and the trans-pacific partnership, which she now opposes, and which obama is still for, and i think will continue to push for, and will probably try to get a vote in a lame duck session of congress. >> sreenivasan: what would hillary clinton's foreign policy be? if there was a doctrine, would it be "strength with caution?" >> i think what it would be is a sort of a very pragmatic approach. and the way i like to think of it is that i think president obama came into office with a very strong idea that he'd been elected to wean this country away from the military excesses of the george w. bush years. i don't think she necessarily comes into office with another

big idea. so i think really what she would do is weigh each problem as it came up piecemeal, look for a pragmatic solution. she'd emphasize diplomacy first, but if diplomacy failed, i think she'd be more willing to consider military force as sort of a last resort. >> sreenivasan: last week we had a couple of trump biographers on. they said one of the qualities they liked about him was his resiliency-- that he can bounce back. can the same be said of hillary clinton? >> oh, sure. she has been investigated i don't know how many times from whitewater and all these things going back to the 1990s, many of them during her husband's administration, and then continuing into her time at state. it could have beaten down a person who wasn't quite as tough as she, driven them from public life. she had every reason to think in 1999, forget this, i'm going to go off and run a huge foundation and make a lot of money and not worry about this anymore. but no, she stayed in it, and now she's on the precipice of

maybe of being the president. if she's anything, it's resilient. >> sreenivasan: mark landler, michael tomasky, thanks so much. >> thank you very >> sreenivasan: see how artists are responding to the political conventions on our website. visit www.pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: german police are probing for a motive behind an 18-year-old's mass shooting in downtown munich yesterday, which killed nine people, including seven teenagers, and wounded 27 other people. the rampage began outside a mcdonald's near the city center before the gunman moved across the street to a shopping mall. hours after the attack, the shooter was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. he was carrying a handgun and 300 extra bullets in his backpack. today, german authorities said there is no evidence of ties between any terrorist group and the gunman, who was a dual

german-iranian citizen. inside his home, police have found books and articles on mass shooters, and the authorities said, he had been treated for depression. the islamic state group, or isis, is claiming responsibility for the deadliest terrorist attack in afghanistan in months. government officials say a suicide bomber blew himself up at a shiite demonstration in the capital of kabul today, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 230 others. in its claim, isis said it targeted persian-speaking hazara shiites, afghanistan's third largest minority, who had gathered to demand a new power line for where they live. turkey's president is expanding his crackdown on political opponents following last weekend's failed military coup. today, recep tayyip erdogan closed more than 2,000 schools, charities, and trade unions, alleging they have links to fethullah gulen, the u.s.-based cleric erdogan accuses of instigating the uprising. turkey arrested gulen's nephew today and said it will request gulen's extradition from the u.s. within ten days.

erdogan's government has jailed around 10,000 soldiers, police, judges, and teachers, and has fired or suspended about 50,000 others. today, erdogan extended the period suspects can be held without charge from four days to 30 days. almost a week of torrential rains has triggered deadly flooding and landslides in china, causing 300,000 people to evacuate their homes. officials say at least 150 people have died, and more than 120 other people are unaccounted for, mostly in the northern province of hebei. officials say 50,000 homes are destroyed. one village washed away as residents slept. some villagers took to social media to say local officials failed to notify them of the danger in time for them to evacuate. in iraq, today was the second hottest day ever reliably measured on earth. the temperature reached a scorching 129 degrees fahrenheit in the city of basra. that's slightly below the day in 2013 when the mercury hit 129.2 degrees in death valley, california.

the national oceanic and atmospheric association said this week that june marked the 14th month in a row of record high average land and ocean temperatures for the planet. a second lawsuit over trump university is moving forward to trial. the california judge presiding over the case indicated in court yesterday he will reject a motion by republican presidential nominee donald trump to dismiss a federal class action brought by former students over the defunct real estate education program. the lawsuit claims the university was a "scheme to defraud" attendees who paid up to $35,000 to attend seminars crets. trump's business judge gonzalo curiel said evidence shows trump had "an ongoing role" in the university's marketing. the first case before judge curiel is scheduled for trial in november, after election day. virginia's plan to restore voting rights to all ex-felons is on hold. the state supreme court has ruled that the sweeping executive order by democratic governor terry mcauliffe in april overstepped his authority.

the court's 4-3 decision yesterday said mcauliffe can restore voting rights only on a case by case basis. mcauliffe's order had aimed to make more than 200,000 virginians eligible to vote again-- almost half of them african-american. mcauliffe says he'll restore voting rights for nearly 13,000 ex-felons who've applied individually to re-register. about six million americans cannot vote due to past felony convictions. >> sreenivasan: during a visit to nice, france, secretary of state john kerry visited an american hospitalized with injuries from the july 14 terrorist truck attack. the patient was not identified. two americans were killed and three were injured when a man drove a truck along the nice promenade following bastille fireworks killing 84 people. finally, russian balloonist has claimed a new world record after flying around the world solo and

nonstop in just over 11 days. the 64-year-old russian orthodox priest touched down today in the australian outback near where he lifted off on july 12. he broke the record of 13 days to balloon around the world set in 2002 by the late steve fossett. that's all for this edition of "newshour weekend." i'm hari sreenivasan. have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made

possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. judy and josh weston. the cheryl and philip milstein family. the john and helen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we are your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. station from viewers like you. thank you.

narrator: "truly california" presented in association with... narrator: next on "truly california"... ...drag queens, fed up with abuse, rioted against the san francisco police... st. jaymes: all those plate glass windows here were broken out. narrator: ...and inspired a wave of transgender activism. st. jaymes: we had to fight for our rights as not gay people, but as human beings. narrator: a revolutionary act uncovered