Heart of a choir boy, soul of a political knife fighter. Meet Kentucky’s Andy Beshear. | Opinion
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Is Gov. Andy Beshear in play for Vice President?
President Joe Biden announced July 21, 2024, he would be bowing out of his re-election bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the new nominee. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s name has been tossed around as Harris’s potential running mate.
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When Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in November decisively won his second election in a deep red state, the punditry predicted a certain ascent to the national stage. After all, it takes a certain kind of something for a Democrat to win over a state that in 2020 voted for Trump by 26 points.
But no one could have known the ascent would happen less than a year into his second term as governor, and probably wouldn’t have guessed it potentially could be as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
Still here in Kentucky, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise: Andrew Graham Beshear, 46, is a talented candidate with the mien of a choir boy and the soul of a ruthless politician who understands exactly what it takes to win races.
Beshear learned politics at the knee of his father, two-term Gov. Steve Beshear, who himself came of age when the Democratic Party was as monolithic in Kentucky as the Republican one is today.
Andy, educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia College of Law, started as a corporate lawyer in Louisville, but always kept an unofficial eye on Frankfort.
In particular, he watched as his father became one of the few governors in the South to expand desperately needed healthcare through Obamacare, despite Obama’s unpopularity in Kentucky.
Andy is not as smooth or charming as Steve. But people just like him. With his dorky Dad jokes, bad selfies and almost painful earnestness, he comes across as genuine.
He is, as the Associated Press once called him, Kentucky’s Consoler-in-Chief, forged by killer tornadoes, cataclysmic flood waters, and countless hugs.
Politics and a pandemic
In 2015, Andy Beshear decided to join the family business.
He beat Republican State Sen. Whitney Westerfield by just 2,000 votes to become Kentucky’s attorney general. He quickly started picking legal fights with then-Gov. Matt Bevin, some successful, some not.
In 2018, he won a big one — getting the Supreme Court to agree that Bevin’s “sewer bill” to reform teacher pensions was unconstitutional. (The pension was so named because it was attached at the last minute to a bill on sewer services.)
That sealed his alliance with the state’s teacher unions, which helped him eke out another narrow victory over the deeply unpopular Bevin, a Republican endorsed by Donald Trump, in 2019.
In the early days of COVID, just three months after his inauguration, Beshear started appearing on television cameras across the commonwealth at 4 p.m. to reassure and guide a truly flummoxed public.
He spawned T-shirts and memes as Mister Rogers and Kermit holding our hands. His wife, Britainy, children Lila and Will, and the photogenic standard poodle, Winnie, rounded out the wholesome image.
And at the same time, he created a brand, “Team Kentucky,” and a relationship with the public that the best PR firm in the world couldn’t buy, all while formulating blue-state COVID policies that infuriated Republicans.
But the daily press conferences provided a connection.
So, just before Christmas 2021, when a clearly shaken Beshear spoke from his father’s home town of Dawson Springs, literally stripped off the map by tornadoes that killed 80, people believed him.
When he went to Kenlake Resort Park to give Christmas presents to now-homeless children, people hugged him in desperation, all of them in tears. And just six months later, he did the same thing in Eastern Kentucky communities where floodwaters took 45 lives and swept hundreds of home away.
Beshear became an expert in tragedy.
On April 10, 2023, Beshear had to call Maryanna Elliott to tell her husband, Tommy Elliott, a close friend and chair of Beshear’s 2019 inauguration, had been killed at a mass shooting at Louisville’s Old National Bank.
He called it one of the hardest days as governor.
Unafraid of a fight
Those events have swamped much of his other work.
Most of his policies, like better pay for teachers, get stopped dead by Kentucky’s Republican super-majority in the General Assembly. It’s not just any super-majority either. There are only seven Democrats in the 38-member Senate and 20 in the 100-person House of Representatives.
Beshear blithely takes credit for the bills he likes, like a recent reduction in the income tax, or hands out oversize checks around the state. Republicans respond with teeth-grinding frustration.
“Beshear has the ability to both convey niceness and to go on the attack,” said Steve Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky who has tracked state and national political trends for several years.
“That skill, the ability to fight the way the Democratic base would want to and protect his genial image at the same time, that’s a skill he could bring to the national stage that could pay off.”
Beshear has the quality of moderation that many voters say they yearn for, but he has remained a staunch defender of such key Democratic base issues as reproductive choice and public education.
Many believe abortion was the tipping point in his 2023 election, thanks to Kentucky’s nearly total abortion ban in 2022 and an absolutely devastating ad by a young woman named Hadley Duvall, who was impregnated by her stepfather at the age of 12.
(Duvall recently appeared on national television with Harris to talk about abortion rights, one of the top issues national Democrats will be campaigning on.)
Beshear beat Attorney General Daniel Cameron by 5 points, a decisive win in which every other constitutional office was filled by a Republican. Cameron was not only a close ally of senior Sen. Mitch McConnell, the legendary Kentucky Republican, but the only candidate to be endorsed by Trump.
Their endorsements weren’t enough.
Beshear now talks up Kentucky’s economic gains, like a huge new electric vehicle battery plant under construction, while also forming his own PAC. Beshear claims he has helped create more than 1,000 private-sector new-location and expansion projects totaling nearly $32 billion in announced investments, creating more than 54,700 jobs.
Republicans say if economic gains are happening, it’s because of their policies, like lower taxes. They often decry Beshear’s lack of cooperation in legislative matters.
Certainly, his administration has seen some black eyes. The always troubled juvenile justice system has continued with so many issues that the federal government is now stepping in to investigate. Beshear runs such a tight ship that his administration frequently restricts any experts from speaking to the media, leading to a troubling lack of transparency.
Vice-presidential material?
As Beshear’s name is bandied about, he has attended larger events and fundraisers, including an A-list Hollywood bash, while insisting that his success only reflects that of Kentucky.
“While it’s nice to hear your name and things like that, I’m just proud of what we have done as a state, and the president and the vice-president have been very helpful in making a lot of that happen,” Beshear said in a July 2 interview with CNN.
The question is whether Beshear’s home-grown appeal might translate to a national stage.
“Scaling up Kentucky congenial to the country is not necessarily easy,” Voss said. “Andy Beshear doesn’t have the high-powered A-list charisma that sells in high crowds.”
No one, of course, thinks a Beshear vice-presidency would have any effect on Kentucky’s voting patterns in the presidential election. Remember, Trump won the Bluegrass State by 26 points four years ago.
What he does have, however, is a counterbalance to Harris. A white man, a staunch Democrat but a moderate one in tone and message, who could temper the view that Harris is a too-progressive Californian. A day after Biden stepped back from the campaign, his name is still circulating.
On Monday’s “Morning Joe” show on MSNBC, he further auditioned for the role by heartily endorsing Harris and attacking the credibility of Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance as a spokesman for Appalachia.
And the vice president’s job requires a lot of duties at which Beshear excels — presiding with compassion and caring over disaster clean-ups, state funerals, and nowadays, breaking Senate ties.
All while keeping eyes on the big prize.
This story was originally published July 22, 2024 at 10:27 AM.
