In early 2023, Kentucky Republicans launched an all-out attack on transgender children, trans families and the state’s broader LGBTQ community. The GOP’s supermajorities in the state House and Senate spent much of that year’s general session constructing and passing Senate Bill 150, one of the most heinous, restrictive, anti-trans bills in the country. One day during this hateful effort, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear traveled to my small, rural town in the middle of his re-election campaign to present a check for tourism and sidewalk improvements near an elementary school.
A standing-room-only crowd gathered in the conference room of our police department. I watched the governor go around and, as he always did, shake every hand. A number of local Republicans chatted as happily with him as everyone else.
When he shook my hand, he smiled and joked, “Long time no see!” as I had just seen him from a distance a few days earlier at the state Capitol, where he’d spoken at a rally for the pro-LGBTQ Fairness Campaign. “You doin’ OK?” he asked.
I immediately thought back to some of the truly ignorant legislative committee meetings I’d covered concurrent with that rally, and how many lawmakers appeared, at best, indifferent to the suffering they were about to cause with SB 150. “To be honest, governor,” I replied, “I cried all the way home from the Capitol last Friday.”
We talked privately for a few minutes about the bill. Then he looked me in the eye. “Hang in there,” he said with boy-next-door sincerity. “Remember, we are all children of God.”
This may sound like an odd conversation for a regular citizen to have with a governor. But I can tell you it felt completely normal to talk to him — to Andy, as Kentuckians began calling him during the pandemic — in this honest, very basic, human way.
With Vice President Kamala Harris now the de facto presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, many consider Beshear one of the most likely choices as her running mate. If he can’t deliver Republican-dominated Kentucky — and, let’s be honest, no one could — what does Beshear bring to a national ticket? The basics. His principled rejection of public mudslinging; his active listening skills, positivity and kindness; and his down-to-earth, Mr. Rogers-like ability to communicate with people no matter their party registration, which is how he won re-election. After years of Trumpian lies, fearmongering and divisiveness, I think we are starving for this.
And Beshear, unlike former President Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance, has a sense of Kentuckians — and Americans — that goes beyond stereotypes concocted for a book. “I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like because let me just tell you JD Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear said on MSNBC earlier this week. “The nerve that he has to call the people of Eastern Kentucky lazy? Listen, these are the hardworking coal miners that powered the industrial revolution. … We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy.” What Vance — who was raised in Ohio, not Kentucky — has in common with his new boss is that they are both slick, millionaire opportunists who exploit regular working folks.
Despite the bad impression our Republican state legislators create, Kentuckians are some of the most generous, welcoming people you will meet. I was born and raised in Missouri; my husband hails from Indiana. But after our son went to the University of Kentucky, he loved the state so much that he stayed. After a decade in Silicon Valley — where my husband worked in the tech industry and, yes, where JD Vance made his money as a venture capitalist — we wanted to be closer to our family and decided to join our son here. In our first days after moving, our new neighbors threw a picnic bonfire for us in freezing cold January.
Beshear reflects that welcoming nature. Long before the GOP’s anti-trans fearmongering in 2023, right-wing activists were circulating a photo of Beshear with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an activist drag troupe, in an effort to hurt him with the Kentucky electorate.
“This is what our Democrat governor is about today,” a Republican state senator claimed. “These are the values that the Democratic Party of today is out there trying to convince our children’s the right way to live.” Conservatives predicted Beshear would run from the photo. Instead, he embraced it. “Everyone in Kentucky counts,” he told a local news station. “I would absolutely take that picture again.”
That approach has paid off: In last November’s gubernatorial election, Beshear won with more than 52% of the vote (up from 49% four years earlier). A month before, I received a Facebook message from a prominent, lifelong Republican in my tiny, rural town. “Yes, I am a Republican,” he wrote, “BUT I AM VOTING FOR ANDY. He is what is best for Ky and has done an excellent job as governor.”
He would do an excellent job as vice president, too.
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Cross-posted from MSNBC.
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