Now that President Joe Biden has bowed out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Murray State University historian Brian Clardy, an Episcopalian, is literally praying that she’ll tap Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear as her running mate.
“He’s a man of faith,” said Clardy, a longtime Democratic activist and member of the Calloway County Democratic Executive Committee.
“I am happy to get behind Vice President Harris and help get her in the White House,” added the professor, who attended President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and was a Kentucky delegate to the 2016 Democratic national convention and a virtual delegate to the 2020 DNC, which nominated Joe Biden.
“I pray that she makes a really good call for vice president. If I had her ear for a moment, I would beg and plead with her on bended knee to consider Gov. Beshear.”
He said Beshear, a Democrat twice elected in one of the reddest Republican Red states, is a crisis leader who would make an ideal Veep. The state delegation to the DNC, at Beshear’s request, endorsed Harris for president.
Clardy said Beshear notably steered the state through the COVID-19 pandemic, nationally the most lethal disease outbreak in a century. When he was first elected in 2019, Beshear, according to the professor, wanted to focus on issues such as creating jobs and boosting the economy, making healthcare more available and affordable and expanding funding for public schools.
“But Covid landed in his lap, and I saw leadership in this man that will always resonate with me,” Clardy said. “In the worst, most hellish days of that pandemic, there was his presence on television and the governor saying, ‘We’re going to get through this –and get through this together.’“
Clardy, who backed Beshear both times he ran, said his continuing leadership in Frankfort “has led me to believe that once he leaves the governor’s office, he won’t be done.”
Limited to two terms, Beshear will leave the governor’s mansion in 2027. Clardy thinks Harris-Beshear would be the best team right now. “It would be a winning ticket, and this country would be rescued from the brink of a police state.”
Meanwhile, for weeks, Clardy, like many Democrats, had been worrying that Biden couldn’t win another term. Clardy was especially anxious over polls that showed Donald Trump leading, if narrowly, especially in crucial battleground states.
So the professor sent the president a letter urging him to bow out of the race. With pressure mounting from Democratic elected officials and donors who shared Clardy’s alarm that Trump was poised to win a second term, Biden withdrew Sunday afternoon.
“I took no joy last week in writing the letter,” said Clardy, who promised to respect whatever Biden decided to do. He would have backed Biden had the president chosen to keep running.
“But I thought about it long and hard. He had a bad debate performance; everyone slips up sometimes. I have had terrible classes.
“So I thought to myself, ‘Why am I being so hard on Joe Biden when his opponent lied through most of the debate and when the liar is not just a racist and rapist but a convicted felon?’ That was my first thought.”
Ultimately, Clardy said cold political reality overcame his deep admiration for the president. “I thought about it from a larger perspective: if he stayed on the ticket, and if he had one or two more bad performances like that one — which was possible — Trump would make hay off of them, and he would run into the ground this perception that Biden was old, weak, and incompetent. I feared he would ride that all the way to victory.”
He said polling data in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizonaworried him. “Those are places that he was losing and would need. I worried that Biden would not only lose but also would take a lot of down ballot Democrats with him. The idea of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance running this country scares the hell out of me.”
Clardy flayed Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, as “authoritarians, opportunists, and hucksters.” He continued, “The idea that Trump could pack the court for a generation with two more appointments and the fact that he’s already told us he’s going to be a dictator on day one and use an authoritarian guide like Project 2025 as a template for governing” led him to send the letter.
“As much as I love Joe Biden, we couldn’t afford the risk of Donald Trump running the tables in November.”
Clardy is all in for Harris. Meanwhile, Biden’s exit from the campaign trail has convinced Clardy that the president, “who has been in this game a long time, probably knows intellectually” that it was time to go.
At any rate, Biden’s departure and Harris’s advent “changes the whole trajectory of the race.”
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