Hillary Clinton Picks Tim Kaine To Be Vice President

Hillary Clinton announced Friday on social media that Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine was her pick to be vice president.

In the message -- sent at 8:11 p.m. ET on Friday night -- Clinton wrote, "I'm thrilled to tell you this first: I've chosen Sen. Tim Kaine as my running mate."

Kaine, for his part, seemed equally thrilled.

Top Clinton aides had promised supporters they could be the first to officially know -- before the press -- and it seems they may have been.

A top Clinton campaign official said that Clinton called Kaine Friday night at 7:32 p.m. ET to inform him that he was her pick. She also spoke with President Obama 16 minutes later to inform him she had selected Kaine.

Kaine was one of a group of two dozen contenders Clinton considered. In April, after the New York primary, her campaign chair, John Podesta, dropped off a Duane Reade plastic bag filled with two dozen binders -- one for each candidate -- with Clinton at her home in Chappaqua.

The rally last week with Kaine in Virginia on Thursday was an opportunity for her to see what a ticket with him would be like.

Clinton, according to the official, enjoyed the rally with him and in particular, liked Kaine's down-to-earth campaign style. After the rally, Clinton invited Kaine back to her Whitehaven Washington, D.C. home. Though the meeting initially included aides, it turned into a one-on-one meeting that lasted about an hour and a half.

The next day, Clinton met with several other potential running mates -- also at Whitehaven -- but it was Kaine that she invited back. On Saturday, Kaine returned for lunch with both their families. President Clinton, Chelsea, her husband, Marc Medvinsky, and Kaine's wife, Anne, were all there.

Throughout her vetting process, Kaine was the only person that Clinton met with twice about the vice presidency. In her deliberations, Clinton always came back around to what she saw as Kaine's readiness to do the job, which is what she has always said was her first criteria.

Podesta, who was also her husband's chief of staff and Counselor to President Obama, gave her some advice about her pick. Her vice president, he said, "needs to be someone who, whenever they walk into a room, you are glad to see them and want to have them as part of any conversation." Clinton felt way about Kaine.

Her final decision came on Friday, July 22.

The Virginia senator is not exactly high-profile, but one thing that most say is that he is exceedingly hard to dislike, a point Clinton alluded to in a fundraising email sent out Friday night.

"To know Tim is to love him," she wrote. "When I was talking to people about this decision, I couldn't find anyone -- Democrat or Republican -- who had a bad thing to say about him."

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona evidently concurs, according to this tweet.

For more on this story visit CBSNews.com.