Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell speaks during the 144th annual St. Jerome Fancy Farm Picnic in West Kentucky, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Mitch McConnell is on his way out — first as U.S. Senate Republican leader, at the end of this year, then as senior senator from Kentucky, surely at the end of 2026. There are no real signs to the contrary, but the 82-year-old Louisvillian won’t come out and announce his retirement just yet, perhaps because it would diminish his influence. Washington still listens to him, and he still brings home its bacon.

When House Republicans passed a government-funding bill with a purely political provision supposedly banning non-citizens from voting (already illegal), which threatened a government shutdown because it was unacceptable to Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden, McConnell said “it would be politically beyond stupid” to shut down the government, and House Speaker Mike Johnson backed off. Donald Trump wasn’t happy, which probably pleased McConnell.

Unfortunately, a decade of such brinkmanship, episodically ended by last-minute, catch-all spending bills that avoid spending cuts to please majorities in both parties, has worsened the nation’s financial situation to the point that our national debt is now larger than the gross national product — a threshold many economists warned against. That, and the occasional standoffs in Washington over raising the debt limit, threaten to undermine the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency, a status that gives us unique leverage across the world.

There will be a reckoning next year, with expiration of the deficit-ballooning tax cuts passed by a Republican Congress and Trump in 2018.

?Meanwhile, McConnell has reclaimed his status as Congress’ biggest slicer of “pork,” local projects funded by federal appropriations.

In the appropriations bills passed before the August recess, McConnell had $498.9 million worth of projects, more than any other senator and far ahead of second-place Susan Collins, R-Maine, who had $361 million. Almost all the difference is the leader’s biggest lick, $218 million to finish the long-delayed larger locks at Kentucky Dam, an appropriation also included in the House energy-and-water bill by 1st Congressional District Rep. James Comer.

Other biggies include $138 million for an Army Reserve hangar at Fort Knox, $50 million for a biomedical research building at the University of Kentucky, $22 million for a precision-medicine center at the University of Louisville, and $20 million to fix the Edmonson County Water District’s supply problem, caused by federal removal of an old dam that exacerbated pollution in Mammoth Cave.

Democrats control the Senate, but spending your money is the most bipartisan of legislative processes; the 49 Republicans in the 100-member Senate got 46 percent of the pork. And McConnell is making up for lost time; he helped pass the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021 but “sat out the earmarking process in each of the first three years after Democratic leaders brought it back in 2021, after a decade-long absence,” CQ Roll Call reported. At the end of that year, McConnell issued a press release decrying “Democrats’ reckless tax-and-spending spree.”

What changed? McConnell is giving up the leadership of a Senate caucus that is largely opposed to earmarks and more concerned about spending and the debt, and he seems intent on getting as much federal help for our relatively poor state as he can before he leaves office. He could become chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the catbird seat for spending, if Republicans take control of the Senate — which seems more likely than not.

McConnell is probably all the more eager to bring home the bacon from the next Congress because he knows that Kentucky’s other senator, Rand Paul, would need to undergo a deep philosophical conversion to become a pork slicer. Paul is a deficit hawk who makes a priority of reducing spending and the debt. His last “Festivus Report” claimed $900 billion in wasteful spending. (The current Senate earmarks total $7.74 billion.)

Because Paul is out of the Republican and congressional mainstream, he’s mostly been a talker on spending, not a doer. If and when he becomes our senior senator, it would be folly to expect much help from him when it comes to getting our share of federal outlays. That should be a priority for representatives of a poor state.

It’s good to talk about reducing spending and the debt, but as long as Congress continues its current practices, I am glad we have Mitch McConnell to slice the pork. And Hal Rogers does a good job of it in the House, as his constituents all over his 5th Congressional District will attest.

Perhaps next year’s reckoning on taxes will also bring a reckoning on spending. Let’s hope it does. But in the fight for federal dollars, which will continue no matter what happens, Rand Paul will amount to unilateral disarmament. So let’s wish Mitch McConnell good slicing.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Father Jim Sichko was the master of ceremonies at the Fancy Farm political speaking, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2024, during the St. Jerome Church parish picnic. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Gov. Andy Beshear’s big audition didn’t get him a new role, but the continuing tryouts of people who might succeed him or seek other statewide office began a new round.

Republican hopefuls were on stage before and during the political speaking at the annual Fancy Farm Picnic, which Beshear skipped — apparently because he was on call to Vice President Kamala Harris as she chose a running mate for the job she now holds.

Beshear didn’t make the Democratic ticket, but seemed in the hunt until Saturday, when sources told The New York Times that he could be a “compromise candidate” who would please both centrists like himself and progressives who objected to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s comments about pro-Palestinian protesters.

In his auditions — TV interviews and appearances at fundraisers and a Harris event in Georgia — Beshear kept attacking the Appalachian bona fides of Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who has family ties to Breathitt County.

Beshear wasn’t a one-trick pony, also talking about abortion — an issue that helped him get reelected last year, in a sea change for Democrats following the Supreme Court’s repeal of federal abortion rights. And his unspoken message was that he was a moderate Democrat who could win over rural voters, who have largely abandoned the Democratic Party in the last 40 years.

But Harris’s choice, two-term Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has a rural background. He grew up on a Nebraska farm, taught high school and coached football in Mankato, Minnesota, a town of 45,000, then represented it in Congress. Perhaps more importantly, Minnesota borders two swing states: Michigan (in Lake Superior) and Wisconsin.

Beshear wouldn’t have delivered Kentucky’s electoral votes, and has to be careful about attacking Trump, who remains popular in Kentucky, for fear of blowback from constituents. Walz has no such worries. Speaking of Trump and Vance two days after President Joe Biden dropped out, he delivered the most memorable line of the auditions: “These guys are just weird. They’re running for he-man women-haters club or something.”

Walz’s pithy sense of humor probably made the difference for Harris, said former 3rd District Rep. John Yarmuth, the Kentuckian who knows him and Beshear best.

Beshear did well in his auditions, though he used Trump’s mispronunciation of Harris’s first name in speaking with Georgia reporters. He leaves the process with his national stock boosted and his Kentucky stock probably undamaged. The auditions “put him in a totally different category of national politicians,” Yarmuth said.

If Harris wins and runs for reelection in 2028, Beshear will have a choice: try to maintain himself nationally without an office, or run for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by three-term Republican Rand Paul, who seems to have his own Trump-like following in Kentucky. But Paul hasn’t endorsed Trump and been making noises about running for president in 2028. When he did that in 2016, Republicans used a caucus system to let him run for the Senate at the same time, but they seem unlikely to do that again, because other Republicans would like to be senator.

In 2026 and 2027, respectively, Kentucky will elect a senator to succeed Republican Mitch McConnell, who seems certain to retire; and a governor to succeed Beshear, who is term-limited. Several Republican prospects for those jobs auditioned before and during the Fancy Farm Picnic.

At the Graves County Republican Party breakfast, 1st District U.S. Rep. James Comer, who narrowly lost the 2015 gubernatorial primary and still wants to be governor, took aim at a possible opponent,? Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman. He joked that he was shocked to hear that his opponent, Erin Marshall, had been endorsed by the lieutenant governor, whom Comer “misidentified” as Rocky Adkins, Beshear’s senior adviser. “If you didn’t learn anything today, know that we have a lieutenant governor, and it’s not Rocky Adkins.” He called Coleman “Jackie something-or-other.”

Adkins is in effect deputy governor, traveling more with Beshear, and a certain prospect for 2027, since he ran second in the 2019 primary. He got a boon when Beshear apparently didn’t allow Coleman to represent the administration at the picnic.

Former attorney General Daniel Cameron, whom Beshear defeated last year, was a late addition to the picnic lineup, speaking on behalf of Trump, who endorsed him in last year’s primary. He said, “For Kentucky and for our country and for our culture, let’s make America great again.”

“Culture” now seems to include the internal-combustion engine. Attorney General Russell Coleman blasted “absurd EV mandates.”

Secretary of State Michael Adams, the only other term-limited constitutional officer, thanked Comer “for holding the Bidens accountable” but made an implicit 2027 case for himself at the breakfast? by saying Republicans must appeal to independent voters. And he, Cameron and McConnell were the only Republican speakers who pronounced Harris’ first name correctly.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

The Fancy Farm Picnic is a whir of political messaging. Al Cross writes that it has become less good natured in recent years. A view of the gathering at the St. Jerome Church parish picnic in Graves County, Aug. 3, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

CALVERT CITY — Other speakers at Friday night’s Marshall County Republican dinner were clean-shaven and dressed up. Marty Barrett had a long beard and wore overalls. He stood out. And his message stood out more.

Barrett, who moves dirt for a living and helps govern the county on Kentucky Lake, ambled to the lectern and got right to the point: “The thing I think we need to work on right now is getting caught up in the hatred and the divisiveness between the parties.”

That was a different message than the typical political rhetoric delivered by most of the local and statewide officials at the dinner. It’s held the night before the annual political speaking at the Fancy Farm Picnic in Graves County, where the traditional barbs between the parties have been less good-natured in recent years.

Barrett, the vice chair of the Marshall County GOP, told his constituents that he doesn’t like personal attacks. And, he said in an interview, that includes the type of personal attacks for which former President Donald Trump is noted: “I disagree with that.”

He told the crowd, “Attack the policy, don’t attack the people.”

Interviewed after the dinner, he said, “I don’t like Trump’s personality. I like his policies. … He stretches everything and brags everything up, and my understanding is that in the part of the country he’s from, that’s a normal thing.”

Barrett, 55, owns and runs an excavating and trucking company with four employees, and is a magistrate on the county fiscal court, Kentucky’s version of a county commission.

“People look at us as politicians, but what we are is public servants,” Barrett told his fellow Republicans, who have him polite applause.

The court and the county of 32,000 have gone Republican in recent years, to the point that a plurality of the voters are registered Republicans. Like some other speakers, Barrett noted that, but stuck to his theme.

“I don’t want to forget what it was like being in the minority,” he said, noting that he has many Democratic friends. “It’s new to them, and they don’t know how to take it. … We can still be neighbors.”

Barrett said in the interview that people in both parties cast those in the opposite party as threats or enemies.

“They don’t respect each other. They don’t respect each other’s values; they don’t respect each other’s religion, or lack thereof,” he said. “Just because I disagree with somebody doesn’t mean I don’t respect ‘em, you know. If they’re still providing for their families and doing what they believe is right, then that’s to be admired.”

He said one example of the lack of respect in politics is Republicans’ repeated mispronunciation of Vice President Kamala Harris’s name, with the accent on the second syllable instead of the first, which is how she pronounces it.

Barrett said it’s a way of “making fun of her,” but “I don’t agree with it, I mean, not every time.”

The keynote speaker at the dinner, state Treasurer Mark Metcalf, did not pronounce Harris’s first name correctly any of the five times he said it.

But Metcalf’s largely partisan address did include a compliment for the Obama administration, in particular Leon Panetta, who was its CIA director and then defense secretary. Metcalf, who served in a National Guard logistics unit that worked in removing the last U.S. troops from Iraq, said “Panetta let the Iranians know there would be hell to pay if they shot at our transports.”

The dinner drew about 40 people. Officials said the turnout was low because this year’s picnic is not expected to make much news, and the county’s fall athletic rollout, “Meet the Marshals,” was going on.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Next to the Wayland Area Volunteer Fire Department in Floyd County are 11 new homes, outside the floodplain. (Photo by Al Cross/Kentucky Lantern)

WAYLAND, Ky. – Gov. Andy Beshear promised a different future for Eastern Kentucky as he made five stops in the region Friday to signal the weekend’s second anniversary of record floods on the night of July 27-28, 2022.

In the little Floyd County town of Wayland, Beshear dedicated 11 homes that he said would be the first “fully inhabited” new development on “high ground,” above the mountainous region’s often-flooded streams.

In the Knott County seat of Hindman, he paid tribute to the flood’s 45 victims, 22 of whom were in Knott, after announcing that the state had bought more than 100 acres for 150 homes on a reclaimed surface coal mine — a dream decades old and finally made possible by the flood’s existential challenge to the region.

“That makes it official,” Beshear said at the Chestnut Ridge development next to the Knott County Sportsplex on Kentucky 80. “This project is happening.” An adjoining tract with 50 homes will be developed by the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky and its partners, and another high-ground community, Olive Branch tear Talcum, is in the works.

Another is coming above Hazard in Perry County, where Beshear announced financing for completion of a road to serve the new 50-acre Sky View subdivision, which will make possible an adjacent private development that Hazard’s mayor says would be the region’s largest housing development.

And in Jackson, he announced $6 million in state aid to build 20 homes for flood survivors and said the state continues to look for a large tract for homes on high ground in Breathitt County, which has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates and is officially estimated to have lost more than 5% of its population since 2020.

“I want people to stay here,” Beshear said, “but you know what? I want people to move here. It’s time for Eastern Kentucky to get its share.”

At Sky View, he said local and state officials “are going to bring hundreds and thousands of new jobs to Eastern Kentucky.” He also pledged, “This fall and this winter you are gonna see those homes start coming up.”

That will be welcome in a region that has heard more talk than action aimed solving its problems, Perry County Judge-Executive Scott Alexander told Beshear and the crowd:

“Governor, far too often, the people of East Kentucky and Appalachia have heard promises from government, only for those to never be followed through. And so I really believe that more and more people will start believing in what we’re doing as they can see the progress happening.”

Tangible progress

The progress was tangible in Wayland, as several families getting new homes in a narrow strip next to the local fire department dedicated the homes with Beshear and officials of the Appalachia Service Project, a faith-based nonprofit that brings volunteers from all over the nation to the region.

“It’s remarkable, the amount of work that’s gone on to make sure these people get back on their feet,” Floyd County Judge-Executive Robbie Williams told the crowd.

One new homeowner is Jackie Bradley, 71, who has been living in an apartment in Martin, where the forks of Beaver Creek meet. Wayland is a few miles upstream, at Right Beaver’s confluence with Steele Creek. She had lived in Glo Hollow, just downstream from Wayland, so close to the creek that her home was flooded twice — the second time a few days after the first, when rains swelled Right Beaver again and her house was caught in a whirlpool. She said her 6-year-old grandson yelled, “Granny, look at your house! It’s like the Wizard of Oz!”

Beshear said repeatedly that the favorite part of his job has been seeing young children go through their new home, picking out their bedrooms. “You just see a little bit of God in that moment,” he said in Wayland.

The Appalachia Service Project plans to build about a dozen more homes in or near the town of 400. Materials are already stored across the road from the new homes, waiting on identification of properties and negotiations for acquisition.

‘Living out the Golden Rule’

State government and other entities helped with the infrastructure for the 11 homes. The Federal Home Loan Bank helped the state with construction financing. “We loan money to banks, but we set aside 15% of our profits for affordable housing,” FHLB of Cincinnati President Judy Rose told the crowd. She said ASP and Beshear have been leaders in “getting boots on the ground” to do the work.

Beshear said the many volunteers are “living out the Golden Rule that we are to love our neighbor as ourself, and the parable of the Good Samaritan that says everyone is our neighbor. In a world that sometimes feels toxic, that we’re supposed to be against each other, you all have come together as one people to truly stand up for each other and to house those that have lost everything.”

Other high-ground developments are in Letcher County: Grand View near Jenkins, which is to have 116 homes on 92 acres, and The Cottages at Thompson Branch near Whitesburg, with 10 homes, one of them already occupied.

Beshear said there may be more: “There’s a couple of others [where] we’re still trying to work through issues.”

He told reporters in Wayland, “We’re more than halfway through because the toughest part that takes the longest are the utilities. … We knew with the infrastructure that was destroyed, with the thousands of people who were left homeless, this was probably the most difficult rebuild in the history of the United States.

“But it happened to the toughest of people. And immediately what we saw was the best of our humanity. It was people pushing aside all the silliness, not caring if somebody’s a Democrat or a Republican, just caring that they are a human being, wanting to get them back on their feet. You saw Kentuckians living for each other, and that Eastern Kentuckians are as tough as nails, and as kind as anybody else out there on planet Earth.”

The Democratic governor said state agencies “worked together in ways we’ve never seen, doing things that were never done.” Officials of the Energy and Environment Cabinet have essentially become land developers, because they have to make sure that the reclaimed mine sites are stable and properly drained.

“We’ve never done anything like this,” Beshear said of state employees. “Their level of dedication, the work they’ve put in while doing their day job, has been really special. I’ve seen amazing leadership from people who may have been in state government almost all of their lives but see this as the most important thing that they’ve done in serving the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”

As it gets into the land-development business, the state is also negotiating with landowners like Paul Ison of Hazard, who donated 50 acres to the state for Sky View but will soon be in a position to profit from developing about 200 adjoining acres.

By building the access road to Sky View, Ison said, “They’re helping the whole community out. You gotta have housing to get another factory or some more business here.”

Beshear said in an interview, “I believe that Paul Ison was very generous. We asked for as much as he would offer, and 50 acres is where he started, and it was more than enough for what we needed. … It’s a good deal for everybody. We can’t build enough just through nonprofits to address overall housing needs, so I welcome private development.”

This story has been updated to clarify that the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky and its partners are developing a 50-home tract near the Knott County Sportsplex and also the Olive Branch community near Talcum. An earlier version had incorrect information.

Al Cross is director emeritus of the Institute for Rural Journalism. After more than 50 years of reporting and editing, he says the trip with Beshear was probably his last for a news story. He retires Aug, 1.

Gov. Andy Beshear has been on the attack against Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, including this appearance on CNN.

Gov. Andy Beshear obviously wants to be in the White House – first as vice president.

He went from coy to clear as soon as President Biden deferred to Vice President Kamala Harris and she started looking for a running mate. Until he endorsed Harris, Beshear said he would consider being on the ticket if he could help Kentucky. Monday, he said he would if he could “further help my people and help this country.”

In that interview and one that aired Monday night, Beshear aggressively auditioned for the job by tearing into his would-be opposite number: Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio.

Vance gained fame and wealth by writing “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” a 2016 best-seller that became a neatly timed reference for people trying to understand Donald Trump’s appeal to white, blue-collar workers who haven’t been to college – often called the white working class.

Vance is from Middletown, Ohio, but says he considers his grandparents’ native Breathitt County “home” because of the love he felt in visits there. The book is mainly about his rise to Yale Law School, but he used a broad, sloppy brush when he described Appalachian culture: “Many folks talk about working more than they actually work.”

In the anthology “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,” Appalachian scholar Dwight Billings of the University of Kentucky wrote, “It is one thing to write a personal memoir extolling the wisdom of one’s personal choices, but quite something else — something extraordinarily audacious — to presume to write the ‘memoir’ of a culture.”

So, to use an Appalachian metaphor, Beshear was loaded for bear Monday. Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” if he was interested in being vice president, he went quicky to his target:

“If somebody calls you on that, what you do is at least listen. And I want America to know what a Kentuckian is, and what they look like, because let me just tell you that J.D. Vance ain’t from here. And the nerve that he has, to call the people of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, lazy. Listen, these are the hard-working coal miners that powered the industrial revolution, that created the strongest middle class the world has ever seen, powered us through two world wars. We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy. So today was both an opportunity to support the vice president but also to stand up for my people. Nobody calls us names, especially those who have worked hard for the betterment of this country.”

In other words, “Lemme at him.”

Presidential elections are rarely about the No. 2 candidates, but Beshear’s unspoken argument may be: “If we can expose Vance as a fraud, it buttresses Harris’s attack on Trump as a fraud, and it just might help us get back some of those rural folks who voted for Obama and then for Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan.” Meanwhile, Beshear was showing he could attack on the national stage.

But as Monday went on, it became known that Harris had asked three people for background material to vet them for vice president: Govs. Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona – three states that, unlike Kentucky, are up for grabs in the election and could decide it.

Then three governors were added to the list: J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, already a lock for Democrats; Tim Walz of Minnesota, a likely Democratic state; and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a key swing state – but her selection would make an all-woman ticket. This was the second tier of candidates, and Beshear still wasn’t in it. ABC, citing an unnamed source, reported Tuesday that Beshear, Cooper, Kelly and Shapiro had been asked for vetting materials.

Meanwhile, Vance, 39, had replied to Beshear, 46, saying “It’s very weird to have a guy whose first job was at his father’s law firm and inherited the governorship from his father to criticize my origin story.”

Asked about that in a CNN interview, Beshear ignored the question and said Vance “would come in the summers maybe for some period of time, or to weddings or to funerals, and then he claims to be from Eastern Kentucky; tries to write a book about it to profit off our people, and then he calls us lazy. This makes me angry, but it especially makes me angry about our people in Eastern Kentucky.”

Earlier, asked to comment on Vance’s charge that Harris and others covered up Biden’s infirmities, Beshear said, “They’re graspin’ for straws. Listen, J.D. Vance is a phony. He’s fake. I mean, he first says that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he’s actin’ like he’s Lincoln. I mean, the problem with J.D. Vance is that he has no conviction. But I guess his running mate has 34.

He had that line ready – maybe too ready. Attack Andy (or “ain’t Andy”) seems over-eager.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

UK Chandler Hospital is located on the university's campus. Instead of building another hospital in the Hamburg area, it will develop specialty clinics, a UK official told lawmakers. (UK photo)

FRANKFORT — The University of Kentucky will not build a hospital in southeast Lexington because it wants to do what its network of rural hospital partners want: focus on its mission as a top-level care facility for the sickest patients, a UK vice president told a legislative subcommittee Wednesday.

The proposed Hamburg-area hospital “was perceived as us stepping outside of our swim lane” by the university’s clinical affiliates out in the state, Senior Vice President for Health and Public Policy Mark Birdwhistell told the Budget Review Subcommittee on Health and Family Services.

“We heard loud and clear, ‘We want UK HealthCare to focus on taking care of the sickest of the sick. We don’t want UK out doing primary care and secondary care.’ . . . That was very eye-opening.”

Birdwhistell reiterated, “The message we received loud and clear from our clinical affiliates was, ‘When our folks get that sick, we want them to come to UK. We want them on campus. We don’t them in a community hospital.'”

UK was in the planning process for a new hospital at the southern junction of Interstates 75 and 64, and had bought the property and done some initial work. Instead of a hospital, Birdwhistell said after the meeting, UK will build a clinic with specialty services like the one it has built in a former department store in the Turfland Center in southwest Lexington, but larger: “Turfland plus.”

The university will also build other clinics to serve its employees in Lexington and the Bluegrass region, many of whom are “having to get health care outside the system,” Birdwhistell told legislators. “We feel like that is our obligation.”

Birdwhistell was speaking to the subcommittee in a new role, which he said will include centralizing the university’s “government-relations activities across campus,” including “building a better partnership with the General Assembly. I felt I was uniquely positioned to do that.”

Previously, Birdwhistell was UK HealthCare’s vice president for health system administration and chief of staff. He was secretary of the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services under Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher, and helped Republican Gov. Matt Bevin propose changes to the federal-state Medicaid program, which he had run before becoming cabinet secretary. He appeared with Angela Dearinger, executive vice dean of the UK College of Medicine, who was briefly health secretary at the end of Bevin’s term.

The General Assembly is firmly controlled by Republicans. In the recent legislative session, Birdwhistell was the university’s point man in changing legislation that helped Pikeville Medical Center and some other rural trauma hospitals but in its original form would have reduced some of the extra Medcaid payments that UK gets for being a “safety net” hospital.

That relates to UK’s recent takeover of other hospitals in Ashland and Morehead, which Birdwhistell discussed at Wednesday’s legislative subcommittee meeting. Speaking of UK’s absorption of King’s Daughters Medical Center in Ashland, he said “Where we failed . . . is when you put that UK brand in front of that name, that brings with it an expectation of service, not predator,” which he said was the perception of some.

“And so, we’re readjusting a lot of the narratives to say, ‘When you have UK in front of your name, you go to a partner and say, ‘What can we do to help you be successful?’ It’s not ‘What do we do to crush you?’ And this is community health care. This is not our forte, so we’ve learned that lesson. . . . We can grow the workforce for those providers and not have to do it ourselves.”

Birdwhistell said UK can also serve as a backstop for its rural partners, noting that UK doctors rearranged their schedules one weekend to keep open the neonatal intensive-care unit at Pikeville, which would have had to close temporarily due to employee vacations. “That’s what we do,” he said. “That’s where we excel and that’s where we need to get back to.”

UK’s latest acquisition is St. Claire Medical Center in Morehead, where it has run a satellite medical-school program for several years. The College of Medicine also has satellites in Bowling Green and Northern Kentucky, and Dearinger said it has seven residency programs in Bowling Green, the state’s third largest city, and is starting residency programs in Ashland and Pikeville.

“We are trying to grow the number of doctors to stay in our state,” Dearinger said, calling UK’s Rural Physician Leadership Program “one of our crown jewels.” She said it has produced 120 doctors, most of whom are practicing in Kentucky, “the vast majority” in rural parts of the state. Later, she said 42 percent of all recent medical-school graduates from UK have stayed in Kentucky, far above the 24% of “a few years ago.”

Two Democratic legislators from Louisville, Sen. Karen Berg and Rep. Lisa Willner, asked Dearinger if UK has had fewer applicants for medical school or residencies due to restrictions on medical education, by which they meant the recent state law that bans abortions except in cases of threat to the woman’s life or permanent damage to a life-sustaining organ.

Dearinger said “To be honest, we have not seen a decrease.” She said she has heard anecdotal reports of students or graduates interested in obstetrics and gynecology going elsewhere, but “we are still inundated with OB applicants to do a residency at the University of Kentucky.”

Another Louisville Democrat, Rep. Sarah Stalker, noted a May 16 Kentucky Health News story, from Kentucky Public Radio, that said 15% fewer U.S. medical-school graduates applied to Kentucky residency programs in the 2023-24 academic year, and there was a 23% decline in those for obstetrics and gynecology, according to the Association of American Medical Schools., which blamed the decline on the state’s near-total abortion ban.

Dearinger said UK is still getting hundreds of “very good applicants, and we don’t have any problems filling our residency programs and fellowship programs with very high-quality young physicians. We are prioritizing as much as we can, Kentucky students, so that they will stay” in the state.

Roll call: Most members of the subcommittee did not attend the late-morning meeting. The chairman, Sen. Donald Douglas of Nicholasville, a physician, noted that at the start of the meeting and made an unusually pointed comment: “I expect my colleagues in the General Assembly to show up.”

This story is republished from Kentucky Health News, an independent news service of the Institute for Rural Journalism in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, with support from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and his vice presidential prospects had been the center of speculation in his home state for weeks. (Kentucky Lantern photo by McKenna Horsley)

When Gov. Andy Beshear formed a political committee in January and started making appearances around the country (he’ll be in Iowa July 27), his obvious long-term goal was the White House. In 2028. Presumably.

If Beshear and his advisers were as wired into the national Democratic establishment as one would think, they knew there was always a chance that President Biden might not make it to the ballot. After all, he turned 81 on Nov. 20, amid much talk about his infirmities.

But surely Beshear’s camp nor the rest of the establishment figured on Biden cratering in his debate with former President Trump, showing that the president had failed the threshold test for any politician: “Know yourself.”

Biden’s hapless performance sparked widespread calls for him to step aside for someone else, but as this is written Tuesday, those calls have come almost exclusively from commentators. No significant Democrat has been willing to incur the wrath of the White House and the establishment by saying the president has no clothes.

On Monday, Beshear was slightly more critical and less supportive than some other Democratic leaders, who have said Biden should stay in. Reporters in Frankfort Monday didn’t ask him that question, and he didn’t volunteer an answer. Asked a general reaction question, he said, “Well, the debate performance was rough. It was a very bad night for the president. But he is still the candidate; only he can make decisions about his future candidacy, so as long as he continues to be in the race, I support him.”

Asked about a possible candidacy of his own, he said, “Only the president can determine his future as a candidate. He IS the candidate, and as long as he is, I’m supporting him.” And what if Biden stepped aside? “The president says he’s staying in and I believe him.”

Those responses were “blazing neon” among most Democrats’ muted comments, senior political columnist Jonathan Martin of Politico wrote on X, where he said earlier, “No elected Dem wants to be the first to speak up in public.”

So, Beshear didn’t embrace Biden, but didn’t quite put him at arm’s length, either. Perhaps he wants to be the presidential prospect with the most candor, which is both admirable and advantageous. He did have one piece of advice for the president: “My hope is that there’s more information forthcoming, that he’ll speak to the American people and leaders around the country.”

That sounded like a plea for a phone call from Biden, but also implied a truth: The president must restore confidence, not just inside his party but in the country, to prevail.

Beshear gets mentioned in any Top 10 list of possible replacements, and sometimes in a Top 5, but is not yet a major player like the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states Democrats need and could carry, unlike Kentucky, and other governors of larger states. And all these hopefuls’ prospects are dubious.

First, barring a serious health episode, Biden’s candidacy is his own, to keep or kill. Second, if he does pull out, Vice President Kamala Harris has the best claim of succession, and Democrats who doubt her electability rightly fear a decimated voter base if the first Black and first woman vice president were denied the nomination.

Also, Harris apparently needs to stay on the ticket, in either spot, for the Biden-Harris campaign to keep the contributions it has received without a laborious refund-and-giveback process that would be a net negative. If she were somehow persuaded to remain in the second spot, it’s hard to imagine Beshear in the first one.

Beshear surely knows that, but he’s playing the long game, making as many friends as he can and touting his record. Monday, he delivered a subtle sales pitch when asked to comment on being mentioned as a presidential candidate:

“It’s a reflection of all the good things going on in Kentucky. As compared to the rest of the country, the temperature’s been turned down here, Democrats and Republicans all excited about the jobs we’re creating, the investment that we’re seeing, record low unemployment, record low recidivism, decreases in our overdose deaths; those are all really good things. So I think the rest of the country turns to us, and says ‘How can a Democratic governor and a Republican General Assembly create really good results?’ And I think the answer to that is, everything is not partisan. People are tired of the clashes day in and day out. So when they look at what WE have done in Kentucky, they see a better future that’s beyond some of the back and forth that we see on the federal level.”

Kentucky Republican legislators surely scoffed at that, but that’s not the audience Beshear was addressing. For now at least, he’s gone national.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Indianola, Iowa, Jan. 24, 2024, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

When U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell voted not to convict Donald Trump of impeachment for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he nevertheless blamed on Trump, he excused himself in part by saying “We have a criminal justice system in this country.”

The Senate Republican leader was surely not thinking about the $130,000 in hush money the president paid a porn star to help his 2016 election chances, which led to Trump’s May 30 conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records – judged to be felonies because they facilitated another crime, election interference.

It was the weakest and least significant of the four criminal cases against Trump, and the verdict may be overturned on appeal; the election-interference crimes weren’t specified. But no other cases are likely to be tried before the Nov. 5 election, so Republicans are using the curiosities of the case to delegitimize the verdict of the jury — a linchpin of our system of government.

They avoid direct attacks on the jury, blaming the judge and the prosecutors. But when they say such things as “judges, investigators and prosecutors . . . misled the jury,” as 4th District Rep. Thomas Massie did on X, they impugn the intelligence of the jury, which included two lawyers and people who get their news from a wide range of sources. And they are, with little evidence, undermining public trust in our courts.

Sixth District U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, a lawyer who knows better, called it a “sham trial.” Second District Rep. Brett Guthrie, a former Army officer who should know better, called it a “kangaroo court.” They didn’t hear the case; the jury did. McConnell was circumspect, saying “These charges never should have been brought.” U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, state Attorney General Russell Coleman and U.S. Reps. James Comer of the 1st District and Hal Rogers of the 5th District, a former prosecutor, called the case political.?

There’s no real proof of that. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat who, like most prosecutors, is elected on a partisan basis. Prosecutors are supposed to be advocates, and while Bragg’s theory of making it a felony case looked like a stretch, he had a mountain of facts to prove the charges. And an appellate court rejected Trump’s attempts to disqualify the judge for alleged conflicts.

Yes, the judge made $35 in anti-Trump political donations, but he swore an oath to render impartial justice, and so did the jurors. Republicans’ attacks on that system are the purest form of cynicism: a belief that everyone always acts in their own self-interest. And the attacks are right in tune with Trump’s siren song to cynical voters, that our whole system is corrupt and nothing is on the level — so he’s the one you should trust. Autocrats have been selling that sewage for centuries, and sometimes millions of people join their cults. Sadly, that is what we see in our country today.

The case’s details take some explaining, so some persuadable voters will be steered by the simple but vociferous arguments of Trump’s defenders. It seems that an outrageous proposition — electing a convicted felon who faces even more serious charges in three other jurisdictions — calls for a defense full of outrage.

The basic fact of the case is Trump did everything he was accused of, and as conservative commentator David French said, “The underlying facts of the case here should be totally disqualifying for any presidential candidate ever.” That is also true of the other cases (about the insurrection, election interference and secret documents), which have much stronger facts that make convictions likely — if they ever come to trial. The election of Trump could prevent that, and cause more injustice. He’s already said he would use the government to wreak revenge on his enemies; allegations that Biden is doing that to Trump are completely unproven, and his own Justice Department is trying his son!

But Trump has long run on lies, the biggest one being that he was defrauded in 2020, and now Republicans facilitate those lies because his election chances will be the biggest factor in their party’s election performance (that’s McConnell’s rationale as party leader); Trump may become president again, and has made clear he will help friends and punish enemies; and even if he doesn’t win, apostates could suffer bad consequences because he’s primed for revenge and has a firm grip on most Republican voters.

So, as disappointing as the reactions of leading Kentucky Republicans are, they are understandable if you think cynically, that they are acting purely in their own political interests. So much for the national interest, and for the moral high ground. As conservative commentator David Brooks says, moral character was once a pillar of American conservatism, and “Character is destiny, and if private virtue falls apart, the public order collapses.” Danger lies before us.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Rep. Savannah Maddox speaks on the House floor. (LRC Public Information)

Some of Kentucky’s Republican primaries for the legislature were the latest chapter in a three-decade struggle between traditional, “establishment” elements of the state GOP and those who want it to be more conservative. The latter faction is gaining ground, but is making too much of its modest gains in low-turnout elections influenced by local quirks and other factors.

Rep. Savannah Maddox, whose outspokenness makes her a Frankfort facsimile of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., called the results “a wholesale rejection of business as usual” in the state capital. Her post on X was retweeted by 4th District U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie; he and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul are thought leaders in the self-defined “Liberty Caucus” of Republican insurgents.

Maddox’s claim hung on two hooks: the 4.4-percentage-point loss of House Agriculture Committee Chair Richard Heath of Mayfield and the overwhelming defeat of moderate Rep. Kilian Timoney of Nicholasville. She would have a stronger case if House Health Services Committee Chair Kim Moser of Taylor Mill had not won renomination (by just 84 votes out of 3,000 cast).

Heath, a veteran legislator who had nearly won two statewide primaries for agriculture commissioner, lost to Liberty-branded challenger Kimberly Holloway by 161 votes out of 3,647 cast. Even Holloway said she was surprised, but Heath was undercut by lawsuits he had taken – a traffic-accident case that some saw as frivolous and one that threw Holloway off the 2022 ballot.

Timoney lost by almost 3 to 1 to Thomas Jefferson – whose name evokes a higher plane than his campaign and an allied group, which sent mailers labeling Timoney “Groomer Killian” and insinuating that he was a sexual predator because he voted against Senate Bill 150, the anti-transgender law of 2023, and a ban on transgender athletes. (Moser became a target when she voted against SB 150 and said, “To the rest of the world who is watching Kentucky: We are not Neanderthals.”)

Some of the money behind Jefferson came from supporters of “gray machines,” gambling devices that were banned by a 2023 bill Timoney sponsored. But the really big money in legislative elections came from establishment sources such as the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and a moderate-establishment group that labeled itself the Commonwealth Conservative Coalition.

Maddox said the CCC “wasted $846,818 trying to defeat rock-solid incumbents,” and “EVERY incumbent whom the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce endorsed AGAINST won.”

Those establishment groups and Senate leaders backed Ed Gallrein against fellow Shelbyville resident Aaron Reed and incumbent Sen. Adriene Southworth, a right-wing election denier who ran third because of her extreme views and a radical redistricting that gave her all new voters except those in her home county of Anderson.

Reed had wanted to run in 2022 but the redistricting put him in an odd-numbered district in a year when only even-numbered districts were on the ballot. He had been campaigning since 2022, and won Anderson, a key to his victory. Establishment Republicans expect him to be more of a disrupter than she was. He told Joe Sonka of Louisville Public Media, “They kind of have to eat a little bit of crow now, and they have to come to me if they want to bring me into the fold.”

Reed and Jefferson both have Democratic opponents, who could have a chance in an election that will have a much larger turnout than the 13 percent statewide in the primary.

But low turnout does not fully explain the election results. Most of the energy in the Kentucky GOP is clearly with those who want it to move farther right, who reject the leadership of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, and who look to Paul and Massie for ideological guidance and inspiration. Maddox was probably right when she said after the election that the insurgents’ successes will energize them for the next round of legislative elections in 2026.

What she didn’t say, and what is also likely, is that some incumbent Republicans will likely move further right to fend off intra-party opposition. That could provide openings for Democrats to begin rebuilding their legislative influence, a task that will take time and more leadership than Gov. Andy Beshear has shown in his role as party leader.

One more note about the primary: I engaged in wishful thinking before the election by saying I would be watching the presidential vote for signs that former president Donald Trump’s support might be eroding in the face of his “hush money” trial. But Kentucky Republicans gave only 6.4 percent of their vote to Nikki Haley, who had suspended her campaign but not endorsed Trump. (She said later in the week that she would vote for him.) Her votes and those for Chris Christie (who still hasn’t backed Trump) and “uncommitted” totaled only 11 percent, making Kentucky’s Republican voters look even more Trumpy that West Virginia’s.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Tuesday is primary Election Day in Kentucky. (Getty Images)

When Mitch McConnell voted not to convict Donald Trump on impeachment for the assault on the Capitol, the Senate Republican leader excused himself on grounds that Trump had left office. That was an untested legal theory; McConnell had already tested the politics of his members, and voted with most of them.

But then he laid the wood to Trump, saying the rioters “did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth,” who displayed “a disgraceful dereliction of duty. . . . There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

After making his legal argument that impeachment was about removal and Trump’s term had ended, McConnell said Trump “didn’t get away with anything, yet. Yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

McConnell clearly expected President Biden’s Justice Department to hold Trump accountable, and clearly hoped that would keep Trump from seeking another term. But Attorney General Merrick Garland (kept off the Supreme Court by McConnell) dithered, and now the only trial Trump may endure is the current one in New York over “hush money.” He is Republicans’ presumptive nominee, so McConnell has endorsed him, doing what he sees as a party leader’s duty.

But that endorsement is about as tepid as an endorsement can get, and many of McConnell’s fellow Kentucky Republicans have similar antipathy to Trump. Yes, they are surely in the minority; Kentucky was one of Trump’s best states in the last two elections, and McConnell’s antipathy is unlikely to change that. He remains the most unpopular U.S. senator in his own state, according to first-quarter polling by Morning Consult.

But now that Trump has finally been forced to the bar of justice, he is showing greater weakness among Republican voters. On April 23, the day testimony in his trial began, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has suspended her campaign, got 16.5 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania’s primary — better than she did in any of the four primaries held on April 2, even though most of those had allowed registered independents to vote. On May 7, in Indiana’s open-to-all-voters primary, Haley did even better, getting 22%. And on May 14, she got 20% in Maryland, 9.4% in West Virginia and 18% in Nebraska (which, unlike the others, barred independents from voting).

My gut, heart and head tell me that most Republicans who have voted or will vote for Nikki Haley cannot abide Trump and are unlikely to vote for him in the fall. So I’ll be watching Kentucky Republicans closely and hopefully on Tuesday night. ? ?

On Tuesday, May 21, Trump’s trial will be winding down and Kentucky will conclude a primary that is open only to registered Republicans, so it could be an even better barometer of long-term Republican antipathy toward Trump. Kentucky was often a bellwether state in presidential races, until its conservative Democrats tired of their party’s increasing social liberalism, but it remains near the mainstream; it recently reelected a Democratic governor and rejected an anti-abortion amendment to the state Constitution.

Porn star Stormy Daniels’ graphic testimony at trial “underscored Trump’s challenges with women voters, which some GOP lawmakers view as his biggest liability heading into November,” Alex Bolton of The Hill noted in a report that quoted several Republican senators. “A troubling sign for Trump is that Republicans who show up to vote in primaries tend to be consistent voters, and as such are a key piece of the GOP base. While they are unlikely to vote for Biden, many of them may simply stay home in November.”

In Kentucky, some Republicans might see staying home as abandonment of their party, but they could still go to the polls and not vote for president. They could rationalize and say that they’re not abandoning their party, but that it has abandoned them by becoming a personality cult for a lying egomaniac with no respect for the rule of law. As one such Republican told me, “People shouldn’t leave the church because they don’t like the preacher.”

Trump is no preacher, of course. His latest “sermon,” at a rally on the Jersey shore, was vulgar, profane and occasionally unhinged. He yelled at journalists, “You guys suck. F— fake news. Go f— yourselves.”

Many Kentuckians are offended by such words, but not by such feelings. Trump’s anti-elite, populist message still appeals to many who want simple solutions to complex problems and think the political system is so corrupt that whatever corruption Trump adds to it doesn’t matter. For him and them, nothing’s on the level.

I hope that doesn’t describe the majority of Republicans, my partisans of heritage, but I fear it does. As for the remainder, my gut, heart and head tell me that most Republicans who have voted or will vote for Nikki Haley cannot abide Trump and are unlikely to vote for him in the fall. So I’ll be watching Kentucky Republicans closely and hopefully on Tuesday night.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Democrat Andy Beshear's last term as governor ends in 2027, a year after U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell is expected to leave office. Beshear and McConnell and McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, a Cabinet member under two Republican presidents, met on stage during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Welcome, Derby visitors! Here’s our annual handicapping of Kentucky’s political horses amid the pageantry of the 150th iteration of America’s oldest continuously held sporting event.

The political star of the Derby TV show, for about 30 seconds during the trophy presentation, is the governor. His name is Andy Beshear. That may sound familiar. He’s in his second term, and his father Steve served two terms, ending in 2015. This is a Republican state, but they are Democrats. How’s that?

As politics became more about social issues, and Republican success expanded to state and local offices in this socially conservative state, many Kentuckians remained Democrats of heritage — willing or even wanting to vote as their parents and grandparents did. And GOP leaders’ and voters’ choices for governor didn’t work out.

Republican Ernie Fletcher got mired in a personnel scandal and lost to Democrat Steve Beshear, an old pro who understood the state — and got lucky again in 2011 when Republicans nominated perhaps the state’s most unpopular politician at the time, state Senate President David Williams, now a well-regarded circuit judge.

Beshear was term-limited in 2015 but worked hard to elect his son attorney general, and they lucked out again when GOP Gov. Matt Bevin said a teachers’ protest against him led to the sexual abuse of children and their use of drugs. About half of Kentucky’s teachers are Republicans, and they made him pay; he lost by 0.37 percentage points.

Republicans thought Andy Beshear would be easy pickings in 2023, but voters liked his performance in the pandemic, and he gained the upper hand. Then his focused campaign, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion, and Kentucky Republicans’ draconian law all but banning it, helped him win by 5 points.

Term-limited, Beshear now looks beyond Kentucky. He has a political committee to help moderate Democrats like himself, and is mentioned in 2028 presidential speculation. He says he will serve out his term, which ends in December 2027, taking him out of the race for the seat of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is stepping down as Senate Republican leader but says he will represent Kentucky through 2026.

Beshear’s best bet at this point looks to be challenging Sen. Rand Paul, who is up in 2028. Paul is more of a libertarian than a Republican, and has become more recently defined as an isolationist, which he calls “informed neutrality.” A deficit hawk, he generally opposes foreign aid, and on the Ukraine issue more or less declared open war against McConnell after his senior seatmate announced he wouldn’t seek another term as leader.

Likely Republican candidates for McConnell’s seat are his protégé, Daniel Cameron, an African American who was attorney general and lost to Andy Beshear; Rep. Andy Barr of the Lexington-centered 6th District, who voted to help Ukraine; and Rep. Thomas Massie of the 4th District, who didn’t. Massie is cut from the same cloth as Paul but has woven it into the political equivalent of an audacious Derby hat, most recently supporting Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s petition to throw House Speaker Mike Johnson out of the chair.

Others in Kentucky’s delegation are less inclined to performative politics. First District Rep. James Comer, the House Oversight and Reform Committee chair, became performative after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy surprised him with the assignment of helping make an impeachment case against President Biden. Comer is a popular fundraiser and TV talker, but has exaggerated and implied too much in trying to tell Republicans what they want to hear. He says he would rather be governor, come 2027; he lost the 2015 primary to Bevin by 83 votes.

Louisville’s congressman is Morgan McGarvey, the delegation’s sole Democrat. If his party takes control of the House, watch him; he was a very effective state Senate minority leader. A small part of Louisville is represented by Brett Guthrie of the 2nd District, who could move up to chair one of the House’s most powerful committees, Energy and Commerce. Fifth District Rep. Hal Rogers represents most of Appalachian Kentucky and is in his 44th year of funneling federal money to it. He is an appropriations subcommittee chair and the longest-serving current House member, and at 86, seems determined to keep it up.

Closer to home, the Republican to look for at the Derby if you need help in Frankfort is Senate President Robert Stivers, who is arguably the state’s chief policymaker since he is the strongest leader in a legislature firmly controlled by Republicans. But he’s not a pusher of hot buttons like many GOP legislative leaders in the South; he is a traditional Republican, close to McConnell, and has steered Kentucky GOPers away from some of the right-wing excesses seen in other Republican-controlled legislatures. He knows that while Kentucky is Republican, it still has Democratic rootstock.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Downtown Hazard sits on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. The Perry County seat redoubled its efforts to fix up Main Street when prospective non-coal employers came to town and saw there were no good gathering places for them to take employees or have business meetings. (Photo by Austin Anthony)

CORBIN — Eastern Kentucky is about to get an avalanche of federal and state money to help it transition from its largely disappeared coal economy, but some of its towns are already lifting themselves up and setting examples for the region.

That was the upshot of the 36th annual East Kentucky Leadership Conference in Corbin, where Main Street is pretty much full again and New Orleans-style balconies show that young professionals are migrating there.

“A lot of younger people have wanted to move closer to downtown,” Corbin City Commissioner Allison Moore said during one panel discussion.

Conference attendees also heard about the revitalized downtowns in Hazard and Pineville, and about the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for which governments and nonprofits are already applying.

“There are now more resources than we have seen in our entire careers,” said Peter Hille, chairman of the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation and president of the Mountain Association, a nonprofit community-development lending institution based in Berea. He’s been doing community-development work in the region for more than 30 years.

In addition to federal money, state government now has a program to help provide matching funds that local governments often need to get grants, noted Casey Ellis of the Kentucky Council of Area Development Districts. Originally targeted to coal counties, its outlay of $1.5 million helped generate $12.8 million in grants last year, Ellis said.

After the conference, held April 25 and 26, Hille gave some examples of the funding opportunities for governments, nonprofits and others:

• U.S. Energy Department funds to reduce energy consumption and bring renewable energy to census tracts where coal mines have closed since 1999, as well as adjacent tracts.
• New programs through the Appalachian Regional Commission, most recently one for multi-state collaborative projects funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural energy program, which covers half of the installed cost for efficiency and renewable energy for rural businesses.
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s? Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, to bring solar energy to homes of low-income people, and money to build the capacity and workforce needed to install the equipment.
• Several other agencies have money for workforce development and infrastructure, including broadband.

Hille also talked about the federal money at the conference’s closing lunch, but also pointed out the efforts by local leaders, often helped with government grants but mainly spurred by local initiative.

“We’ve been seeing our communities come back to life,” he said, “because they are recreating themselves as places where people can live and choose to live.”

That’s essential as communities look for employers to replace coal jobs, said Bailey Richards, downtown coordinator for the City of Hazard. She said the Perry County seat redoubled its efforts to fix up Main Street when prospective non-coal employers came to town and saw there were no good gathering places for them to take employees or have business meetings.

“We realized you have to build a community,” Richards said in one panel discussion. In the last five years, downtown redevelopment has brought 70 new businesses, 62 of which are still open, accounting for more than 250 jobs. Richards noted proudly that Hazard’s population rose 18 percent from 2010 to 2020, while Pikeville, which has the region’s best-known revitalized downtown, grew 12 percent.

In the Bell County seat of Pineville, Mayor Scott Madon looked out the window of his second-floor insurance office a few years ago and saw a public square with 20 percent of its buildings occupied. Now it’s 100 percent full, after a redevelopment plan that will hit its second big phase this summer, Madon said during a panel discussion.

One key was a five-year moratorium on property-tax assessment increases, which required the cooperation of the county government. Madon said the first property to emerge from the moratorium will pay $10,000 in property taxes this year, after generating only $400 a year before it was redeveloped. To help businesses succeed, Southeast Community College helps them work up business plans, and checks with them each quarter to see how they’re doing.

Hille said successes like Pineville’s and Corbin’s usually have “spark plugs” like Andy Salmons, who is both Corbin’s Main street manager and owner of a former drug store converted into a local-food restaurant and bar with apartments above. He did that 12 years ago, when half of downtown buildings were empty.

Skeptics, and there were many, “said nobody’s going to come to a farm-to-table, craft-beer bar in Corbin,” Salmons said. He ran out of money just before it was time to open, and people who wanted to see him succeed rounded up the last thing he needed for the Wrigley Taproom and Eatery: chairs.?

More openings followed, the town went fully “wet,” not just for restaurants, and other towns noticed and followed suit. “Corbin was a game changer in this region,” said Jacob Roan, the city’s parks director.

Some relief coming for housing shortage

Much of the conference focused on the region’s chronic housing shortage, which has been worsened by floods, inflation and high interest rates, which have also raised rents and home prices. But wait. “Help is on the way,” said Pam Johnson of Fahe, formerly the Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises.

Using flood-relief money and other funds, and donated land, the state has started seven housing developments in the counties hit hardest by the 2022 flooding. It recently started taking applications for $298 million in federal disaster-recovery money intended for housing and infrastructure to support it.

The application deadline is June 1, said Matt Stephens, general counsel of the state Department for Local Government. The five counties hurt most by the floods – Breathitt, Letcher, Knott, Perry and Pike – will get 80% of the money. The other 20% is allocated to 15 other counties flooded in 2022.

“We’re looking at a summer and fall of housing starts that we have not seen,” Johnson said. “That’s going to give a boost to the communities.”

Eastern Kentucky has a housing shortage partly because it has shortages of three things related to housing: developable land, infrastructure and contractor, said Wendy Smith, a deputy executive director of Kentucky Housing Corp., a state agency.

Smith said rents have climbed so much that landlords who once took federal Section 8 housing vouchers no longer do so, to avoid inspections required by the program, and more than half the people who got vouchers from KHC turn them back in because they can’t find housing in the 210 days the voucher can be used.

She said there is little new “middle housing” such as duplexes and triplexes, on which developers make less money. And while there is money for apartment buildings and rent subsidies, many people in Eastern Kentucky don’t like apartment living.

“It’s because we’re connected to the land,” Corbin Mayor Suzie Rasmus said, unlike “the rest of the nation, that is so transitory.”

This story is the first in the latest series of stories about Appalachian Kentucky from the Institute for Rural Journalism, based at the University of Kentucky. If you have story ideas, contact Director Emeritus Al Cross at [email protected] or Jenni Glendenning, the institute’s David Hawpe Fellow in Appalachian Reporting, at [email protected].?

Firefighters try to extinguish a fire after a chemical warehouse was hit by Russian shelling on the eastern frontline near Kalynivka village on March 8, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine. Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Kentucky’s congressional Republicans were deeply divided on aid to Ukraine, setting the stage for their expected primary to succeed U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who led the fight for it and seems likely to retire in 2026.

The loudest on each side were U.S. Reps. Thomas Massie of the Fourth District and Andy Barr of the Sixth District. Massie voted against the aid bill and criticized Barr for supporting it, after Barr threw shade at Massie on a related issue without naming him.

Both men have been in the House since 2013 and are logical candidates for the Senate. Barr is based in the only major media market limited to Kentucky, and is a senior member of two major House committees; Massie is the outspoken libertarian ally of U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, and they have access to major right-wing funders.

Before the House acted on Ukraine aid, it took up a border-security bill that failed because it needed a two-thirds vote to pass, under a rule supported by all Democrats and “a handful of self-destroying Republicans,” Barr posted on X. What he didn’t say was that those Republicans acted on behalf of former President Donald Trump, who opposes action on the border crisis so he can keep maximum advantage over President Joe Biden on the issue.

One of those Republicans to which Barr referred was Massie. In a reply to Barr, he noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson couldn’t pass Ukraine aid without votes from Democrats, who “wanted [a] separate show-vote on border [issues] to give guys like Andy (who voted for $100B foreign aid) political cover. We refused to go along with charade in Rules Committee!” Massie, a Rules Committee member by virtue of a deal that elected previous speaker Kevin McCarthy, had voted against the rules for the border and Ukraine bills. That was a clear break with most House leaders, which he soon made clearer by endorsing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate the speakership.

Barr made his own stance clearer, and put a label on Massie, by replying: “Another truth the isolationists don’t want to admit: Every border security bill will die in [Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer’s Senate…” (In reality, the Senate has passed a bipartisan border-security bill, which Trump scuttled.)

Massie replied with a broadside aimed directly at Barr: “You voted for the omnibus. You voted for warrantless spying. You voted to send $60 billion to Ukraine today in exchange for nothing from the Senate. Speaker Johnson never tried to attach border security to this bill. Maybe it’s time to quit blaming conservatives for your votes.”

The omnibus was the recent spending bill to keep the government open. “Warrantless spying” is authorized in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Massie and Paul tried to amend by requiring federal agencies to obtain a court order to buy Americans’ online data, David Catanese of the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. Massie got the measure through the House, but it failed in the Senate.

Sen. Rand Paul’s political punch has increased lately, thanks to his alliance with billionaire Jeff Yass. In March, Yass gave $8 million to a political committee affiliated with Paul, Tom Loftus reported for the Kentucky Lantern. Yass owns 15% of the parent firm of Tik Tok; the firm would have to sell the social-media platform, under a bill the House passed as part of the package of aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and other nations. Massie voted no.

Besides Massie and Barr, another likely Senate candidate appears to be former attorney general Daniel Cameron. He recently formed his own PAC, which he said will give only to Kentucky Republicans. Cameron was the GOP nominee for governor last year, but seems to have made the Senate his new target.

The likeliest Republican candidate for governor in 2027 is Rep. James Comer of the First District, who lost the 2015 nomination by 83 votes. He told me Monday that he’d still rather be governor than anything else.

Comer voted against Ukraine aid, and said he didn’t look at the latest intelligence on the war, as Johnson had pleaded with members to do. “I have had nothing but bad experiences with the intelligence community,” Comer said, adding “We have to stop spending money we don’t have.” He said his district is “overwhelmingly” against the aid; that opinion has surely been solidified by Trump.

The rest of Kentucky’s delegation supported Ukraine aid. Rep. Hal Rogers of the Fifth District, who in some ways has the state’s Trumpiest district but is loyal to House leaders, heavily downplayed his vote for the aid in a press release that emphasized what Massie called his “show-vote” for border security. It said the Ukraine bill “includes a loan repayment agreement,” but that’s only for $9 billion, and the loan is forgivable. Rogers’s office said he saw the latest intelligence.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

George L. Atkins was a state auditor like none before him, exposing shady deals in the administration of Democratic Gov. Julian Carroll. Later, as a lobbyist for Humana, Atkins pleaded guilty to mail fraud and served time in jail.

George L. Atkins Jr., who died April 14 at age 82, was a politician for barely a decade. But he was a touchstone for modern Kentucky politics and historical currents that go back more than a century: the corrupting force of big business, voters’ desire for reform, the influence of the news media and the compromises made by people in public life.

Atkins’ political life began at the University of Kentucky, where he played basketball for Adolph Rupp, and in his hometown of Hopkinsville, where he was appointed and elected mayor in his early 30s. His smooth but forthright manner was so appealing that he was easily elected state auditor in 1975, and even before he took office was on short lists of prospective Democratic candidates for governor in 1979.

Atkins was an auditor like none before him, exposing shady deals in the administration of Democratic Gov. Julian Carroll, and that was the basis of his campaign. There was another major reform-oriented candidate, former Louisville Mayor Harvey Sloane, and Democratic sage Ed Prichard and others thought they should team up, perhaps with Atkins running for lieutenant governor. Sloane told me that a Louisville meeting was arranged, but a snowstorm kept Atkins from getting there. Then businessman John Y. Brown Jr. jumped into the race just before the filing deadline, and the meeting wasn’t rescheduled.

In such a fractured race, newspaper endorsements took on more importance, perceived or real. Keith Runyon, who was on the editorial board of The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times, told me Publisher Barry Bingham Jr. was preparing to endorse Atkins until his father, company Chaiman Barry Bingham Sr., steered the endorsement to Sloane, to whom the elder Binghams were close. (That set the stage for the newspapers’ endorsement of Republican George Clark for mayor over Sloane in 1981, which contributed to the family dissension that led to the papers’ sale in 1986.)

With no big endorsement and polling poorly, Atkins withdrew and backed Brown, who had suggested privately during a KET debate days earlier that they “get together.” Atkins told me then that “the real key” was a classic column by The C-J’s John Filiatreau that portrayed the Democratic field as a poker game robbed by a Republican bandit as they argued. Atkins’ endorsement helped nominate Brown, who finished 4.49 percent ahead of Sloane.

Atkins became Brown’s finance secretary and cabinet secretary, sort of a deputy governor, but also the target of anti-Brown Democrats. At the 1980 Fancy Farm Picnic, former Gov. A.B. “Happy” Chandler said the state wouldn’t have bought its famous Sikorsky helicopter “if George Atkins were still alive.” The quip stuck so well that Brown himself used it at the next picnic to remind the crowd he was selling the ‘copter that had brought him: “If George Atkins were still alive he’d never let them take that helicopter from me.” The headline in the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer read, “Atkins roasted again at Fancy Farm.”

Chandler, who entered politics in 1927, had a knack for reflecting the public mind, in which Atkins had evolved from a crusading reformer to a high-flying governor’s tool. That image lingered in 1983, when he ran for lieutenant governor. But he probably would have won if not for this: A supporter of Sloane, who was running for governor again, asked him, “Who do you want for your lieutenant?” he replied, “Steve Beshear,” the attorney general. Sloane’s whisper was loud enough for C-J reporter Robert T. Garrett to overhear, and his story put Sloane on the defensive a week before the primary.

After Beshear won by 4.8%, he told C-J reporter Richard Wilson that Sloane’s remark helped him run a strong second in Jefferson County to former County Judge Todd Hollenbach, and that was his key to victory. Several others were running for lieutenant governor, so the remark hurt Sloane, who lost to eventual Gov. Martha Layne Collins by only 4,532 votes, 0.7%. Beshear came up short in the 1987 gubernatorial primary, but was elected governor in 2007 and 2011, setting up his son Andy to likewise serve two terms.

So, many political threads ran through George Atkins, but he was spent as a politician. He had a family to support and joined Humana, then a hospital company, and became its chief lobbyist. In 1990, Humana was determined to have the legislature relax limits on hospital expansion in Louisville. The deciding vote for the bill was cast by state Sen. Patti Weaver of Walton, after Atkins agreed to help her get a state job. When she failed the state personnel exam and threatened to tell her story, Atkins funneled $10,000 to her through Sen. Helen Garrett of Paducah (who was convicted on an unrelated charge in a broad federal investigation of state-government corruption, mainly in the legislature).

Atkins pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to 24 weekends in jail and 400 hours of community service and fined $10,000. Humana apologized and paid the $92,437 cost of the investigation. In sentencing Atkins, Judge Joe Hood was harder on Humana, suggesting that the company knowingly blinded itself to his actions as it pressed him for results. Atkins told Hood the bribe money came from a Humana account that he could use on his own. Humana said afterward that it knew of no illegal acts but “Closer supervision might well have prevented this occurrence.”?

Atkins, facing the possibility of a year in prison, told Hood that he hoped “in some way this could be a wake-up call for thousands of people just like me . . . You can’t get so wrapped up in your job, so wrapped up in your career … that you don’t stop and ask, ‘Where does this lead, where does this go?’”

Atkins remained a health-care consultant in Washington and was largely forgotten in Kentucky, but his words are worth remembering. If anyone ever had a meteoric career, it was him: a young man full of ideals and promise who came up just a little short in his last election, and wound up cratering. There but for God’s grace go many of us. May his example be remembered.

The Kentucky House of Representatives in session, Feb. 27, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Arden Barnes)

In a republic, the form of government that the U.S. Constitution prescribes for states, the will of the people is supposed to be exercised through elected representatives. In Kentucky, we call our government a commonwealth, a term borrowed from our mother state, Virginia, meaning that it should serve the well-being of the people.

The people’s well-being, and their will, were not served on several issues in the recently concluded session of their elected representatives. That’s true of every legislative session, but it’s particularly remarkable for one that had billions of dollars in surplus the General Assembly could have used to give the people some things they want and need.

The overarching issue is the Republican-controlled legislature’s maintenance of a big surplus to justify more income-tax cuts, to reach its stated goal of abolishing the tax. Advocates point to greater economic and population growth in some of the seven states that have no income tax, but those states have advantages that Kentucky does not: warmer climates in Tennessee, Texas and Florida; the oil industry in Alaska and Wyoming, and broadly legalized gambling in Nevada. Most states have a broad variety of taxes.

Like other states, Kentucky spends the bulk of its state tax revenue on education, and most of that goes to pay teachers, who are getting harder for Kentucky schools to find partly because their salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation or raises in other states. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear wanted to raise teachers’ pay 11 percent, but that was a non-starter in a GOP legislature that sees teachers as his primary political base. So it again left raises up to school districts, but didn’t give most of them enough money to make much of a difference.

Beshear also wanted to fund pre-kindergarten for every child in the state, but that faced not only a political obstacle — a governor who hasn’t worked with the legislature very well — but an ideological one: some conservatives’ notion that it would move too much child-rearing outside the family. But we have a society and an economy in which most parents want or need to work outside the home.

Beshear also asked the General Assembly for a big increase in funding of child care, partly to replace the loss of federal pandemic funds, and a Republican senator, Danny Carroll of Paducah, made a more ambitious proposal. The legislature passed much more modest increases, prompting the hundreds of providers who care for more than 150,000 children to say that they were “at risk of collapse.”

Children figure in many issues, including their use of nicotine vapor products (22% of high-school students) and adult Kentuckians’ addiction to tobacco, fourth in the nation at 17.4%, the biggest driver of the state’s bad health status and health-care expenses. A broad array of groups interested in the Kentucky’s health, including the state Chamber of Commerce, sent senators a letter asking that the state’s annual tobacco-prevention spending be raised to $10 million from $2 million, but Senate President Robert Stivers and Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer told me that none of the advocates for the increase ever spoke to them about it. Thayer questioned the efficacy of prevention programs, but surely our commonwealth can afford to make a stronger effort and see what happens — if for no other reason than fewer smokers mean less Medicaid spending.

The legislature punted on the most difficult issue, abortion. Most Kentuckians oppose our law that bans abortion in nearly all cases, but Republicans bottled up bills that would have made exceptions for rape and incest — because that point of the issue divides them and they don’t want their anti-abortion base fractured in an election year. But the issue seems likely to get a hearing before next winter’s session.

Finally, a good word for the Senate: Thanks, for not taking floor action on the House bill that would have gutted key parts of the Open Records Act and Open Meetings Act by allowing public officials to surreptitiously conduct public business electronically. This was a case where ardent conservatives like Sen. Gex Williams, R-Verona, trumpeted the value of transparency in government and forced a closer look. That’s what the House and Senate need to do, in detail, before the next session — in cooperation with news organizations and other open-government advocates.

To be sure, we will never eliminate the doing of public business in private, but we need strong laws to discourage public officials from doing that. Of course, it doesn’t help that the majorities of the House and Senate set a bad example by deciding most big issues secretly, in their party caucuses. Those have become nearly impenetrable, with the departures of leakers and a shortage of reporters at the legislature. As Justice Louis Brandeis of Louisville said, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.” Give light, or leak!

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Senate Republican Floor Leader Damon Thayer (LRC Public Information)

When the legendary Allan Trout was chief of The Courier-Journal’s Frankfort Bureau, he liked to work up “trial balances” on governors and legislatures, evaluating their performances in progress. With two days left in the 2024 General Assembly, largely to reconsider bills Gov. Andy Beshear vetoes, here’s a ledger on the current General Assembly.

Economic conservatives will be pleased that the budget for the two years beginning July 1 keeps the state on track to reduce and perhaps eliminate its income tax, by maintaining a huge surplus. Economic liberals will be disappointed that the state isn’t using those billions to make pre-kindergarten classes universal in a state that still lags in education and, as a result, income.

Social conservatives will be pleased that the legislature is trying again to open the door to public support for private schools, an idea that barely overcame rural resistance in the legislature then ran into a buzzsaw in the courts. Their ultimate solution, an amendment to change the state Constitution, will be on the Nov. 5 ballot.

That doesn’t please social liberals, or rural conservatives who hold public education in high regard, but there’s merit in letting voters decide the issue — unless the referendum question becomes warped by the millions of dollars likely to be spent by both sides.

The ballot will have at least one other amendment, which is completely unnecessary — except for Republicans who run the show and want to generate voter turnout from an ardent part of their base. It would ban non-citizens from voting, which is not a thing. Unless you’re trying to appeal to suspicion, ignorance and hatred of immigrants.

The ballot could still get two more amendments, because they bypass the governor, but it seems unlikely. The House didn’t like the Senate’s idea of moving elections of statewide constitutional officers to presidential election years, which would help Republicans but disadvantage House members, who can now seek those offices without giving up their seats. And there seems to be no sentiment in the House to curb the governor’s pardon powers, another Senate-passed idea of Sen. Chris McDaniel of Kenton County.

Republican politics ruled in passage of bills aimed at Louisville, the biggest blue island in our red state. Republicans struggle in Metro Council and mayoral elections, so they’re making them nonpartisan — and keeping the current council from changing land-use ordinances for a year, among other things. They hate the teachers’ union, which has its biggest local in Louisville, and they’re unhappy with the Jefferson County Public Schools, so they’re starting a study of breaking up the district.

Several other bad ideas died.

When the House decided to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs at state universities, the door to compromise was slammed by the Senate, which had passed a bill that would’ve done little more than ban things that aren’t going on anyway. It’s hard to imagine the two chambers agreeing in the veto session on something Beshear would accept.

When the Senate narrowly voted to transfer the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources to the state Department of Agriculture, over the objections of hunters and fishers who fund the agency, the House listened and killed the bill. The best sign this was a bad idea is that it was introduced late, perhaps in an attempt to short-circuit constituents’ objections.

You could say much the same about the bill to create a new agency to oversee horse racing and charitable gaming, which passed in the minimum three days at the end of the session. Charitable-gaming interests seemed to be caught flat-footed, which horse-racing interests never seem to be. That’s always been true, but now the industry has two of its own in power: Senate Floor Leader Damon Thayer and House Speaker David Osborne. Is this a bad idea like those above? It’s hard to say. In racing terms, it has not been well vetted— except among those who agree on it.

Still hanging fire is a bill that would badly weaken the state Open Records Act, by exempting from it messages on government officials’ personal electronic devices. Now, those messages are subject to disclosure if they involve government business. The House, and then a Senate committee, rejected language that would have exempted many officials and agencies from the law.

The bill is on the Senate floor, so it could still pass, but to become law it would have to be acceptable to Beshear. His office worked on parts of the bill, and he endorsed the current version, so perhaps the Senate wants to spotlight it and make sure that he shares the credit and/or the blame for it. They’d better just forget it; this one could blow up in their faces. Sooner or later, voters are going to get tired of officials running the public’s business like personal business.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Senator Mitch McConnell and wife Elaine Chao wave to the crowd during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Are you trying to understand why Mitch McConnell would endorse Donald Trump for president, after blaming Trump for provoking the Jan. 6 insurrection and after Trump insulted him and his wife Elaine Chao, the latter with racist slurs?

Go back with me to when McConnell was just starting his climb to the top of Senate Republicans’ leadership ladder. We could still call his home telephone, which answered with this recording: “This is Mitch McConnell. You have reached my home. If this call is about business, please call my office . . . ”

“About business.” Not “about my service to you in the United States Senate,” or some other phrase to make a personal connection between the public servant and those being served.

No, for McConnell, politics is business — which helps explain why the lame-duck Senate Republican leader can endorse someone who dubbed him a “broken-down crow,” a “stone-cold loser” and a “dumb son of a bitch,” and called his wife “China loving” and “Coco Chow,” whatever that meant in Trump’s warped mind.

Asked at Tuesday’s brief Senate Republican press gaggle how he could reconcile the endorsement with the fact that he called Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the events of Jan. 6 and that Trump had insulted him and his wife, McConnell merely restated the facts: “On Feb. 25, 2021, shortly after the attack on the Capitol, I was asked a similar question, and I said I would support the nominee for president even if it were the former president.”?

But when asked if he was comfortable with Trump as the nominee, he essentially repeated the above statement and added, “I said I would support President Trump if he were the nominee of our party, and he obviously is going to? be the nominee of our party.” He took two more questions, both unrelated, and ended the gaggle.

So, McConnell is holding his nose as he endorses a man he abhors, but why endorse? The closest he came in his prepared statement, before citing their joint accomplishments during Trump’s term, was saying that Trump “has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee.”

Believers in democracy may argue that this is the way the country is supposed to work: Elected representatives follow the will of the voters. But McConnell knows that Trump has misled voters with lies and other falsehoods; he said it on Trump’s last full day as president, talking about Jan. 6: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

But McConnell’s Republican colleagues fear those voters’ wrath, so most of them had already endorsed Trump. And that is surely the biggest reason he has joined them. You can’t be an effective leader of a party in Congress in a presidential-election year if you aren’t in harness with your party’s presidential nominee. A Trump victory would make it all the more likely that Republicans will regain the majority in the Senate, which has always been McConnell’s prime directive as minority leader. He needs to be on the same page with Trump with endorsements, fundraising and spending in Senate races.

McConnell signaled all that in April 2022 when he told interviewer Jonathan Swan, “As the Republican leader of the Senate . . . I think I have an obligation to support the nominee of my party,” who “will have gone out and earned the nomination [from] Republican voters all over the country.”

In other words, as McConnell might put it, that’s just the way party leaders should conduct their business. But McConnell is a party leader because he is a senator, and senators have much bigger obligations — to the country and the Constitution, which Trump has talked about terminating in one of his lying rants about vote fraud.

Perhaps McConnell has confidence that Congress would be able to hold a reelected Trump in check, but given the track record of each, that confidence is misplaced.

Consider McConnell’s own words after Trump’s second impeachment trial: “President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful — disgraceful — dereliction of duty.” His unspoken message was that “Some breaches of duty, oath and morality are so repugnant, they trump party loyalty,” John Dickerson of CBS News said in a commentary, adding that McConnell’s latest message is absolution of Trump, and “Maybe all that fuss about Jan. 6 wasn’t that big a deal. Otherwise, how could a man of character, at the end of his career, justify endorsing someone for a duty that they had previously said that person was disgracefully derelict in performing?”

Because for McConnell, it’s just business.

Perhaps he thinks he needs to retain power and influence to rescue Ukraine from Russia, which some in his orbit see as a bigger threat than Trump. But the Senate has had its say on Ukraine, and now the country will have its say on Trump. McConnell’s say was surely not a statement of conscience, but a reflection of his desire to maintain his Senate standing.

The title of Michael Tackett’s forthcoming biography of McConnell is “The Price of Power.” One price of being a party leader is that to some extent, you must be a follower — if you want to keep the job. But the job is not as important as the country. McConnell’s taking care of his business, but not the country’s business.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Then-President Donald Trump and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell talk to reporters in the Rose Garden following a lunch meeting at the White House, Oct. 16, 2017. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

When Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday that he would not run again for Senate Republican leader, he tacitly acknowledged that he doesn’t fit well in a party headed by Donald Trump — whose presidency he aided and whose candidacy he has pledged to endorse.

“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time,” McConnell said, noting his successful efforts to pass the Ukraine aid bill that was favored by only 22 of the 48 Republican senators. So we knew the larger, unspoken meaning.

The announcement wasn’t unexpected, given McConnell’s age (he turned 82 on Feb. 20, which he noted) and his recent health issues, but its timing was a surprise. He reportedly decided weeks ago that he would step down, but didn’t want to announce that until the Senate passed the bill to keep sending aid to Ukraine. The Senate was in recess until last week, and these sorts of announcements typically come in a Senate floor speech.

McConnell began that address by saying that the Feb. 10 death (still incompletely explained) of his 50-year-old sister-in-law brought “a certain introspection that accompanies the grieving process.” When I interviewed him three days after the tragedy, he choked up as he spoke about Angela Chao, so her death may have been a catalyst.

?McConnell is still writing his story. His full legacy may not be known until after he leaves the Senate in January 2027 — because that could be in the middle of a second term for Trump, who poses a serious challenge to the way Americans govern themselves.

Nevertheless, McConnell’s announcement came at a time when Trump is cementing his control of their party by locking up its nomination for president — and when The New York Times had just reported back-channel conversations between representatives of McConnell and Trump about the endorsement that McConnell said three years ago that he would give Trump if he were nominated, though they despise each other.

Purposely or not, McConnell’s announcement makes whatever endorsement he delivers to Trump less consequential, to use a word he likes to use as a neutral metric for people in public life.

And that brings us to McConnell’s legacy as the Senate’s longest-serving party leader since the role was defined just over 100 years ago.

A comprehensive analysis of McConnell’s 17-plus years in the job needs a more expansive platform; some topics, like the political influence of money, had other advocates, but he was a political and intellectual leader of that movement, which is fitting, because he’s one of the few politicians I know who enjoys raising money.

But beyond the wide range of issues on which he prevailed or exercised major influence, McConnell is one of America’s most consequential politicians. Who else can say that they reshaped the Senate, and then (with nominations adopted by Trump) the federal judiciary, with lifetime appointments from bottom top?

McConnell’s calculated audacity in holding open a Supreme Court seat probably helped elect Trump, who made it his key to winning over evangelicals. Less well known is McConnell’s advancement of the filibuster as a standard operating procedure in the Senate, requiring 60 votes to pass significant bills. That dates from McConnell’s first term as leader, in 2007. Democrats played a role, too, but most expert observers agree that McConnell was the driving force.

So, our country and the Senate are different places because of Mitch McConnell — and not for the better, if you favor such things as a right to abortion and a tax system adequate for our needs while paying our national debt. But he advanced the causes of “religious liberty, free speech, Second Amendment rights” and other conservative hallmarks, as columnist Marc Thiessen wrote in The Washington Post.

From a Kentucky viewpoint, McConnell has used his power to help our needy state in many ways. He masterminded political victories that made it a Republican state, but that would have eventually happened, with the Democratic Party’s move to the left on social issues, away from most Kentuckians. Republicans moved right, and McConnell moved with them to enhance his chances of being a Senate leader.

McConnell is still writing his story. His full legacy may not be known until after he leaves the Senate in January 2027 — because that could be in the middle of a second term for Trump, who poses a serious challenge to the way Americans govern themselves.

McConnell twice protected Trump from conviction upon impeachment, the second time because he was unwilling or unable to get enough Republicans to “strike the snake when they had the hoe in their hand,” as put by former Kentuckian Bob Garrett, who just retired as Austin Bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. They surely feared repercussions from Trump and his voter base in the 2022 elections and beyond.

Senators have two fundamental responsibilities: to serve their states, and to serve the country — by supporting and defending the Constitution, as they swear to do. Leaders of parties in the Senate have an additional responsibility, keeping or gaining the majority in the chamber. Sometimes leaders let that latter responsibility prevail over the one required by the oath, and put party before country.

If Trump wins in November, that could guarantee a Republican majority in the Senate, but now the party is the Republican Party in name only. It is the Trump Party, and that is not a party in which Mitch McConnell belongs. In endorsing Trump, he would be keeping a pledge, but one made before Trump was indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election and other charges.

McConnell has an out. He should take it, or at least send a signal by delaying an endorsement until Trump is actually nominated. Let’s hope McConnell’s announcing out of the party leadership is not the end of his national leadership.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, center, walks with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, left, and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol to meet with congressional leadership on Dec. 12, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

When the Senate voted 70-29 Tuesday to send more aid to Ukraine, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was in the majority of senators — but in the minority of his own party. It was an important marker for the nation’s longest-serving Senate leader.

For most of his career, the Kentuckian has been known for his use of political power, and not so much for acting on principle. But in this case, he fought for what was once a core value of the Republican Party: internationalism, with the United States as the pole holding up the tent of world order.

In a party led by Donald Trump, that has not only ceased to become a core value, but something for Republicans to campaign against. Trump opposed the bill, which has $60 billion to help Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion (and $14 billion to help Israel fight Hamas, which cost it some Democratic votes).

McConnell is also known for acting with political motives, but in this case, Republicans’ Senate campaign chair, Steve Daines of Montana, said they would be hurt by passing a foreign-aid bill without the border-security measures on which the House is insisting.

Remember, the House rejected the Senate’s bipartisan border-security bill because Trump wants to use immigration as a campaign issue. If this craziness continues, Ukraine, or much of it, will become part of Russia and the standing of our country will be greatly damaged at a perilous time.

“By any objective standard, the world is in a very, very challenging phase,” McConnell told me. “We now have two major-power competitors . . . and we have what Reagan would have called an axis of evil . . . with Iran funding all these proxies. . . . I think this is a uniquely dangerous position for our country and the world.”

With most Republican senators not voting that way, McConnell said he has sometimes felt like Winston Churchill “warning about the Germans” before World War II — in which his father was a soldier and “met the Russians” in what is now Czechia in 1945. “We have some letters he wrote to my mother . . . saying he thought the Russians were going to be a big problem, and that certainly proved to be true.”

McConnell entered politics as a moderate Republican, but moved rightward with his party to climb its leadership ladder. He had largely stopped doing that as it became more Trumpian, so this wasn’t the first time he has been in a minority of his caucus. Other examples include the big infrastructure bill and measures to raise the national-debt limit and keep the government open.

“There are a number of members who are glad these matters get taken care of, but for some reason or another don’t want to vote for them,” McConnell said. According to The Wall Street Journal, 19 Republican senators voted for the infrastructure bill in 2021, and 17 voted to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023.

Keeping the government open in early March, and avoiding the blame that always attaches to Republicans when it shuts down, is likely to be McConnell’s next test. He can do little for the Ukraine-aid bill in the House, other than what he has already done — publicly call on struggling Speaker Mike Johnson to put the bill up for a vote.

“The politics are difficult but the facts are simply overwhelming,” McConnell told me.

That sounds like a failure of the political system. McConnell said he didn’t mean it that way: “I’m just trying to focus on the facts and the right thing for our country and the free world.”

This is the latest chapter in a long struggle between the forces of internationalism and isolationism, largely among Republicans. Isolationism prevailed in the GOP before World War II, but after it, enough Republicans changed their minds for the nation to adopt internationalism. Republicans did that after 1952, when they chose an internationalist, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as their presidential nominee, and he was elected twice.

Today’s GOP bears little resemblance to that one, and Trump is its ruler, as Republicans in Congress kowtow to him, pleasing voters who want simple answers to complex problems. “I think the declining support for Ukraine is almost entirely because our nominee for president doesn’t think it’s a good idea,” McConnell told the Journal.?

McConnell usually talks little about Trump, because casting aspersions at the leader of your party is not a way to maintain your influence. Getting 21 Republicans to vote with him was something of a victory over Trump, but that very observation is an indicator of McConnell’s reduced influence.

McConnell’s health issues lead many to think he will give up the leader’s job after this year, but he’s mum on that. He will be 82 Tuesday, and his Senate term runs through 2026. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who didn’t vote with him on Ukraine, told reporters that McConnell could probably be reelected leader even if Trump wins the presidency.

The election will also determine Senate control, and Republicans are reasonably hopeful about regaining it. McConnell would surely relish one more round as majority leader, and he’s all about politics when it comes to regaining control. On Ukraine, he told me, “Our non-incumbents can take whatever position they want to on this issue.”

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Then President Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell shown at the White House in 2017. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

When Mitch McConnell kept the Supreme Court from going liberal, then worked with Donald Trump to remake it and other federal courts in the image of the Federalist Society and big-money political contributors, that looked like the primary legacy of McConnell’s decades in the Senate.

Then Trump falsely contested his 2020 defeat, inspiring the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, and McConnell called him on it — but was unwilling or unable to get the Senate to convict Trump on impeachment and disqualify him from office. So that looked, to many, like more of a legacy moment.

Now, in perhaps his last year as leader of Senate Republicans, McConnell is in a crucible with historic implications. At stake are the next presidential election, the future of the Republican Party, the future of Ukraine, and the standing of the United States in the world. And by the way, how history will remember Mitch McConnell.?

Ukraine may not survive as a truly independent nation without more weapons and ammunition from the U.S., and increasingly isolationist Republicans in Congress say it will get no more aid until President Biden accepts their demands for changes in asylum policy and other border security.

The phrase “their demands” has at least two definitions, because House Republicans have a plan stricter than the one being drafted by Senate Republicans — who, unlike their House counterparts, are in the minority and have to work with Democrats to pass bills.

McConnell wanted to pass one package with border security and aid to Ukraine — of which he has been the main advocate and defender — but he had to adopt a border-first approach due to internal pushback. Then Trump won New Hampshire’s Jan. 23 presidential primary and became Republicans’ all-but-certain nominee. The next day, McConnell privately told GOP senators that the politics of the issues had changed.

Republicans had been divided about Ukraine but united on the border, but now Trump was pushing them to kill the unseen Senate border bill — because, McConnell said, Trump wants to run on the issue, is the “nominee” and “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” Punchbowl News reported and other news organizations confirmed.

This was a remarkable statement for someone who had blamed Trump for the Jan. 6 riot and said after the failed impeachment that the justice system could hold him accountable. But McConnell had said not long after the second failed impeachment that he would support Trump if nominated this year.

McConnell had hoped he would never have to deal with Trump again, but now he does, partly because Attorney General Merrick Garland — whose Supreme Court nomination McConnell had blocked, preventing a liberal majority on the court — and his appointees moved too slowly to charge Trump with the crimes of Jan. 6.

While McConnell showed Trump a measure of respect by referring to him as the party’s nominee, he also said the former president had put Republicans “in a quandary,” senators told The New York Times. McConnell left the specifics to other senators, such as Mitt Romney of Utah, who said ”the idea that someone running for president would say ‘Please hurt the country so I can blame my opponent and help my politics’ is a shocking development.”

In any event, this would be the first immigration-reform measure without something for Democrats, who are willing to swallow it because the border problem endangers Biden’s reelection. But some Republicans don’t want to take yes for an answer. “Some of McConnell’s Republicans warn that he’s failing to read a House GOP that has no interest in policy achievements with Biden in office,” Politico reported.

It can be argued that McConnell is in a fix of his own making because he didn’t push to try, convict and disqualify Trump for Jan. 6. But we still don’t know whether he could have gotten 10 more Republican senators (including himself) to convict and disqualify, whether and how he explored that possibility, and how much the prospect of Trump forming a third party as revenge figured in the calculations.

What we do know is that polls in the days after Jan. 6 showed Trump losing little support among Republicans, but McConnell and then-Vice President Mike Pence losing most of theirs — a strong indication that getting to 67 conviction votes from the 57 actually cast would have been difficult. There’s still no evidence that McConnell tried to do that; if he had really tried, we would know about it, and he might no longer be leader. If he had tried and succeeded, he still would have been in a minority of his caucus on a fundamental issue, a dangerous position for a leader who wants to stay leader.

Right now, McConnell seems to have the good of the country in mind. But how did that enter into his calculations then?

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

In the back right stands U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell who attended the Jan. 2 swearing-in of Kentucky's Republican constitutional officers. They are, from left, Commissioner of Agriculture Jonathan Shell, Auditor Allison Ball, Attorney General Russell Coleman, Treasurer Mark Metcalf and Secretary of State Michael Adams. (Kentucky Lantern photo by McKenna Horsley)

FRANKFORT – The tableau in the rotunda of the state Capitol on the year’s first day of business was, for a moment, reassuring to those of us who worry about the future of the party in which we were long registered and where its current strongman may take it and our country.

The swearing-in of Republican constitutional officers – Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell, Auditor Allison Ball, Attorney General Russell Coleman, Treasurer Mark Metcalf and Secretary of State Michael Adams – was attended by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who made remarks and stood behind them as they posed for pictures.

The lineup seemed broadly representative of the Kentucky Republican Party, which has remained more traditional than Trumpian as the former president has transformed the national party into a personality cult swallowing his lies.

Kentucky Republicans looked like that four days later, when their party’s central committee voted narrowly to say that many people at the U.S. Capitol riot were “wrongfully detained” and “have been unconstitutionally held without the right to due process and the right to a speedy trial by a jury of their peers.”

There is no evidence to support those assertions, but millions of Americans believe them because they have been repeated and amplified by Donald Trump and his media minions.

Trump’s campaign for president rests largely on his lies about the 2020 election, which he lost by more than 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral votes, and increasingly on the lies he tells about Jan. 6, going so far as to call those convicted of crimes “hostages.”

It’s shameful, ridiculous and dangerous. It leads to mischief like the bomb threats that cleared the Capitol and other state capitols the day after the Republican ceremony. “While some on the right have been affected,” The Washington Post reported, “many targets share a common attribute: They have done or said something that has earned Trump’s ire.”

The state Republican resolution says those at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, gathered “to express their frustration with the electoral process,” reflecting the false belief that Joe Biden stole the election. That has become an article of faith for most Republicans, partly because Trump started laying the groundwork for it even before the election.

The best evidence that’s false are the 60 judges who ruled against Trump after the election, and a comprehensive investigation by The Associated Press of “every potential case of voter fraud” in the six battleground states that decided the election.

The AP found only 475 disputed ballots and reported, “The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.”

This was a straight news story by the nation’s most widely used news source, one that has no ideology or agenda other than reporting the news, and satisfies the needs of news outlets all across the political spectrum because they own it. (The story remains available for use, even by weekly newspapers not part of AP). Sadly, few elected Republican officials talk about those facts, because they fear Trump and his followers, and the prospect of defeat in a party primary.?

But in Kentucky, Adams has stood up to election deniers as the state’s chief election officer, and McConnell declared Biden the winner the day after the electoral votes were cast, then blamed Trump for the Jan. 6 riot. They have set the tone for Kentucky Republicans – at least until the state party’s central committee passed, 34 to 32, a resolution with language like one filed by state Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, R-Smithfield.

Most Republican leaders avoided comment on the resolutions. Tichenor’s went to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Whitney Westerfield of Christian County, who told me that he wouldn’t bring it up and that the state party resolution was “stupid.”

Other Republicans should follow Westerfield’s lead and speak honestly and frankly about such efforts to support Trump’s lies. Kentucky Republicans have more freedom to stop sniveling, now that the Jan. 5 filing deadline for this year’s elections has passed; the chances that anti-Trump talk will cause them electoral problems this year have disappeared in most Republican-held districts.

But some Republicans are looking ahead to 2026. One seems to be 6th District U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, who endorsed Trump for president last month — for no apparent reason, other than maybe to get a leg up on running for the Senate seat of the likely retiring McConnell in 2026.

Barr and other Republican snivelers bring to mind the William Butler Yeats quote that retiring Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah put at the top of his iPad as he considered running in 2018: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

If they’re really the best, they don’t lack convictions, and they express them.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

(Getty Images)

The notion of giving fanciful but pointed presents to public figures at Christmastime is an old one, established in Kentucky in 1981-82 by the late Ed Ryan when he was chief of The Courier-Journal’s Frankfort Bureau and institutionalized by his successors, Bob Garrett and Tom Loftus. I also inherited the enterprise, and at a time when many traditions of journalism and politics are being upended, I’m sticking with it.

Gov. Andy Beshear

A repeating reel of Tyler Childers singing “Universal Sound” at Beshear’s second inauguration, where we learned it’s one of the governor’s favorite songs. That wasn’t surprising; Childers says we’re all part of “the chorus of the universal sound” and Beshear’s current theme is “Forward Together” when his fellow Democrats are badly outnumbered by Republicans in the legislature. They might scoff that Beshear wants them all to sing “Kumbaya,” but he seems to be looking beyond them. At the inaugural, he said the state has the chance to be “an economic and moral leader” of the nation; in his budget address Monday night, he changed that to “THE economic and moral leader of the country.” Sounds like the first page of a playbook for president in 2028.

Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman

First, our wishes for a full recovery from her current health issue. Then, a gift of a comedy writer to put some snap into her speeches, which Coleman will need if she’s going to speak as long as she did at the inauguration, getting more into policy than Beshear. A free helper: her father, former state Rep. Jack Coleman, who cracked after being introduced by Beshear Senior Adviser Rocky Adkins (another likely candidate for governor in 2027), “I’m just through the most stressful part of this day, wondering what Rocky’s going to? say.”

Attorney General-elect Russell Coleman, no relation to the above

To the newest Republican gubernatorial possibility, a photo collage of Kentucky’s six Republican attorneys general, only one of whom became governor: William S. Taylor, whom the Democratic legislature replaced with the assassinated William Goebel in 1900. A better model is the first one: John M. Harlan, who became a highly regarded Supreme Court justice.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

A big Ukraine flag, because he is the linchpin keeping that courageous country from being re-absorbed by Russia. To get the votes of other Republicans to keep weapons and ammunition flowing, he has had to? insist that the package include border-security improvements, but he puts it in global terms, as he did Monday: “An imperialist thug is trying to redraw the map of Europe. A repressive authoritarian state is preparing to put more of the Indo-Pacific under its control. And the world’s largest state sponsor of terror [Iran] is showing us it’s as determined as ever to kill American servicemembers and disrupt global commerce. There is simply no room for falling short, here. We cannot afford to get this wrong.” Right.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul

He gets a Ukraine flag too, to remind him of the importance of that country and its people, for whom he seems to have little if any sympathy. He says we don’t have the money. We do, and it’s mostly spent here.

U.S. Rep James Comer, R-Frankfort

A two-headed coin, since he first said Hunter Biden could have his choice of testifying privately or in public. After Biden chose the latter, Comer said he would first have to testify privately – as other witnesses have, but in a setting that allows their testimony to be manipulated.?

U.S. Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville

A small medal, like those given to all in a meritorious military unit after a campaign, to signify the “shadow majority” he and fellow Democrats had in providing most of the votes for the four major bills that passed the House this year (the most unproductive session in modern times) while the Republican majority was mired in performance politics, the tyranny of a small minority, and political enslavement to Donald Trump.

U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington

?For his Monday endorsement of Trump, a lump of coal for his Christmas stocking. (They both like coal.)

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg?

Floodlights around his home to remind him and his wife that a public office is a public trust, which requires transparency and openness to maintain the trust of the public. He’s a Democrat, but on this point behaves more like legislative Republicans, who need to restore openness and proper deliberation to legislative procedure.

To all Kentuckians (if we only could)

A subscription to your local newspaper, which needs it to pay for journalism and to fight for open government at all levels. And finally, our thanks for reading these columns and keeping an interest in the state’s politics. Ultimately, the recipients of these gifts are accountable to you. May you and they remember that.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Gov. Julian Carroll takes the oath of office in 1975. (University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center)

Every life has lessons. The life of former Gov. Julian Carroll, which ended Dec. 10, had plenty of lessons in its 92 years, including an instructive narrative in Kentucky political history.

Born in the depths of the Depression, when his big family in McCracken County sometimes didn’t know where its next meal was coming from, he became the last Kentucky governor with lots of money to spend throughout his term in office, and the last one with a compliant legislature, one he had helped run.

Carroll also was the last governor who was a product of Democratic factionalism that was a defining feature of the state’s politics for half of the 20th century. When he successfully changed factions and succeeded, he created a faction of his own, but it was shattered by a federal corruption investigation.

That didn’t stop “the Juice,” the appellation a long-ago reporter gave him, playing on his first name and the zest with which he approached politics and public speaking. He practiced law in Frankfort and was a legislative lobbyist and a state senator, retiring in 2020.

He had one of Kentucky’s longest public careers, one that could be traced to the 1949 Boys State civic-affairs conference, where Carroll was elected “governor” and went on to meet President Harry Truman in the White House. Valedictorian and newspaper editor at Heath High School, he was destined for politics.

Through a Boys State contact, Carroll worked in the law office and 1955 campaign of Gov. A.B. “Happy” Chandler, and backed Chandler in the 1963 primary against winner Ned Breathitt, protégé of then-Gov. Bert Combs. But when Combs ran again in 1971, Carroll agreed to be his unofficial running mate for lieutenant governor. That cost Carroll his biggest law client, Western Kentucky electric executive J.R. Miller, and ruined his relationship with Miller’s political protégé — Lt. Gov. Wendell Ford, who presided over the state Senate while Carroll did likewise in the House, as speaker.

Ford beat Combs, and in another upset, Carroll defeated Attorney General John Breckinridge for the second spot. “Wendell just flat outworked Bert, and I just flat outworked Breckinridge,” Carroll recalled, but he acknowledged that being on Combs’ ticket made a bigger difference. In an interview Oct. 4, he also revealed that he dashed around the state in a car and airplane furnished by his college friend, wealthy horseman Brownell Combs, whom he put on the state Racing Commission when he was governor. Combs was later chairman.

Elected in 1971, Ford and Carroll were factional foes. Governors couldn’t be reelected then, and Carroll wanted to succeed Ford in 1975, but Ford wanted Carroll to run for the U.S. Senate against Republican Marlow Cook in 1974. Carroll stood his ground, Ford relented and beat Cook, and Carroll became governor almost a year before he had planned. He easily won a full term of his own, and thanks to a state budget fattened by a coal boom, the 1976 legislative session was one of the state’s most progressive.

Without increasing taxes, Carroll and the General Assembly created a statewide kindergarten system, made textbooks free, raised teacher pay, created a building program for poor school districts, boosted many state services, and ended the commercial bail-bond system as part of implementing the judicial-reform amendment that voters added to the state constitution in 1975.

Carroll was a master of those issues and the budget, perhaps more than any other governor, but he suffered from hubris, and the legislature chafed under his tight control, finally rebelling in his last year in office. By then, his plan to install Commerce Commissioner Terry McBrayer as his successor was failing due to a federal grand-jury investigation into state contracting and commission-sharing on state insurance policies. Carroll denied wrongdoing, but some of his subordinates went to prison and he invoked the Fifth Amendment to protect himself.

Al Smith, for whose newspapers I worked during almost half of Carroll’s administration, wrote in 2011, “When he was the governor with a pitifully low salary, he accepted favors and bestowed some that were improper. But he was the last New Dealer governor in Frankfort. When he shaped those budgets, he never forgot the meek and the poor.” He still remembered growing up poor with 10 siblings.

Carroll ran for governor in 1987, apparently seeking redemption or vindication. He denied it, unconvincingly, and ran last in the primary. In 2004, he won an open state Senate seat, but after he made an anti-gay remark in 2016 a man who had sought his help produced a 2005 recording in which Carroll asked for sex. Sometimes the pitfall of a long career in public life is that it lasts too long. But he found it hard to quit; few politicians enjoyed politics more than the Juice. May his zest be remembered.

This column is republished from The Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack presided at Gov. Andy Beshear's private swearing in at midnight Tuesday. (KET screenshot)

State Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack was master of ceremonies for Gov. Andy Beshear’s private swearing-in ceremony as Tuesday began, providing a platform for him to reflect on his and Beshear’s work during the pandemic, work that won public approval and set Beshear up for reelection.

Taking the lectern in the Capitol Rotunda after Land Office Director Kandie Adkinson rang bells to start the ceremony, Stack noted that Adkinson had done likewise in the rotunda for each victim of the pandemic. Then he addressed Beshear, recalling their first meeting after his first election in November 2019.

“We could scarcely have anticipated the . . . journey we would soon share,” Stack said, alluding to the March 2020 beginning of the pandemic and Beshear’s daily news briefings, where Stack usually spoke.

“Through thick and thin you supported science” and health professionals, Stack said. Despite criticism of his emergency orders restricting businesses, schools and other activities, polls early in the pandemic showed Beshear with high approval ratings for his work on it, and that was later reflected in his overall job-approval ratings, which remained positive this year despite millions of dollars of attack ads aimed at him.

The private swearing-in is held at midnight because the state Constitution says the governor and lieutenant governor’s terms begin on the day five weeks after the election. After Beshear took the oath of office, emphasizing with a smile that “I have NOT fought a duel with deadly weapons,” he said “We will continue our record-breaking economic win streak,” reward educators and get “high-speed internet to every home.”

He said the state has faced tests from the pandemic, natural disasters and the continuing opioid epidemic, and one of its most difficult challenges is the increased toxicity of politics and governance, with political attacks “turning people against their neighbors just to have one more elected leader with a certain letter after their name.” He said he hoped that Kentucky could be “a moral leader for this country.”

Stack, returning to the lectern, said people will forget what you say and do, but “People will never forget how you made them feel,” and they “don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” He told Beshear, “The people of Kentucky know how much you care.”

After taking her oath, Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman said Beshear “treats every Kentucky family like his own.”

In the benediction, the Rev. David Snardon asked, “May we abandon the ideology of separation, seeing ourselves as red or blue, black or white, wealthy or poor.”

This article is republished from Kentucky Health News, an independent news service of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, with support from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

Democrat Andy Beshear's last term as governor ends in 2027, a year after U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell is expected to leave office. Beshear and McConnell and McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, a Cabinet member under two Republican presidents, met on stage during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Kentucky voters gave Andy Beshear another four-year term as governor. What will he do with it? The answers may conflict as he considers them personally, politically and governmentally.

The latter two are already intersecting, as the Jan. 5 filing deadline for legislative seats approaches and prospective Democratic candidates look to Beshear for support — or a qualified signal that support would come after the legislature adjourns in April.

Democrats have criticized Beshear for giving scant help to legislative candidates, but in a state that keeps trending Republican, the party’s priority had to be reelecting him. Absent that, the party would be practically defunct, since it holds no other statewide elective office.

Now, reelected by a relatively comfortable margin of 5 percentage points, and prohibited from seeking another consecutive term, Beshear has political capital to spend. He can raise money for candidates, campaign with them and perhaps lend them some of the longstanding, resilient popularity that was key to his defeat of Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

Republicans’ legislative majorities are huge, and could be long-lasting, but as party leader, Beshear has an obligation to his fellow Democrats to help them regain relevance. At the same time, playing the traditional party-leader role – which also includes recruiting candidates — conflicts with the olive branch Beshear offered legislators the day after he was reelected.

“Let it be a new day with a relationship with the legislature,” he said, perhaps tacitly acknowledging the stiff-arm he’s given legislators since he started exercising emergency powers in the pandemic. Beshear reiterated his policy priorities of universal pre-K and a big pay raise for teachers, which the legislature has ignored. But those would be good issues for Democratic legislative candidates, and well-placed challengers could soften Republicans’ attitude.

That also applies to abortion. The governor also called on the legislature to add rape and incest exceptions to the state’s near-total ban on abortions, an issue that spurred his victory. Cameron, surely wanting to avoid being seen as squishy on a central GOP issue, opposed such exceptions in the primary, then went neutral. Beshear cast him as an extremist, most notably in the TV commercial in which a young woman said she was impregnated by her stepfather at age 12 and said, “This is for you, Daniel Cameron!”

Almost 90 percent of Kentucky voters favor such exceptions, so “It was a potent message,” said Beshear’s campaign manager, Eric Hyers.

So, Beshear’s reelection could make the legislature more responsive to voters on the issue. But Republicans could follow Cameron’s lead and try to engage Beshear in a debate over how long a pregnancy can last before abortion is prohibited. That issue could be forced on the governor and the legislature if the state Supreme Court, in a long-delayed case, finds the near-total ban unconstitutional. An alternate law generally bans abortion after six weeks.

Beyond state issues, Beshear’s victory in an otherwise thoroughly red state has made him a national figure, mentioned as a presidential candidate for 2028 — or even 2024, if President Biden is forced out of the race for whatever reason. In either year he could make a logical vice presidential nominee, with plenty of time to run for the top job. He will turn 46 on Nov. 29.

The notion of President Beshear may not have seemed plausible a year ago, but after running two disciplined, successful campaigns in a red state and an administration that has been equally disciplined – to the frustration of those who would like to know more about how he operates – he has a legitimate place in the national conversation. But in personal terms, is that where Beshear wants to be? Maybe. He told Jonathan Martin of Politico a few months ago, “I’ve always known what’s next in my life; I don’t now.”

Beshear said last month that he would serve every day of a second term, ruling out being on the national ticket in 2024 or running for the Senate in 2026, when Mitch McConnell’s term is up.

Apparently, McConnell wanted his protégé Cameron to seek reelection as AG to set up a bid to be his successor, but when Cameron saw he led GOP polls and could get former president Donald Trump’s endorsement, he chose to challenge Beshear. Trump helped him win the primary easily, but in the general election, he seemed to shake few voters from their approval of the incumbent, baked in since early in the pandemic. Cameron and his wife reportedly dislike the idea of him going to Washington while they’re raising young children, so he might want to make another run for governor in 2027. He, too, has plenty of time; on his next birthday, Nov. 22, he will be only 38.?

The end of the McConnell-Beshear era in Kentucky politics is in sight. Who will own the next one?

Al Cross’ column is republished from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

The rate of infant mortally dropped by 6% in Kentucky last year while rising nationally. (Getty Images)

For the first time in 20 years, the rate of infant mortality in the U.S. ?showed a statistically significant increase in 2022, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national baby-death rate rose 3% from 2021, but in Kentucky it dropped 6%.

The rate measures the percentage of babies who died before their first birthday. The national rate rose from 5.44 deaths per 1,000 births in 2021 to 5.6 per 1,000 in 2022. Kentucky’s rate fell from 6.15 in 2021 to 5.77 in 2022 and now ranks 28th among the states. In 2021, the state ranked 17th.?

Kentucky’s infant-mortality rate has usually been higher than the nation’s, reflecting its status as a poor state with lower-than-average health, but in 2019 its rate was 4.9 deaths per 1,000 births and the national rate was 5.6 per 1,000.

The state has fared worse in maternal mortality, the rate of women who die while pregnant or within six weeks of giving birth. It led the nation in 2021. Last year, when it ranked sixth nationally, state officials extended postpartum Medicaid coverage to one year after birth; it had lasted for only 60 days.

Infant mortality declined in Kentucky and 17 other states in 2022, led by Nevada at 22%, followed by Alabama, New Hampshire, Arkansas, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Minnesota, South Carolina and Kentucky.

Following Kentucky on the list of states with decreases were Mississippi, which still had the nation’s highest rate, 9.11 per 1,000; North Carolina, 6.49; Oklahoma, 6.89 (all down about 3%); and Illinois, 5.59 (down 1%).

Most bordering states showed an increase in rates: Ohio, 7.11 (up 1%); Virginia, 6.21 (up 4%), Indiana, 7.16 (up 6%); Tennessee, 6.61 (up 7%); West Virginia, 7.32 (up 8%); and Missouri, 6.77 (up 16%). Arkansas continued to have one of the higher rates, 7.67 per 1,000, but had one of the bigger decreases, 11%.

Experts were uncertain of the reasons for the national increase. They noted increases in maternal complications and cases of bacterial meningitis, influenza and respiratory syncitial virus (RSV), both of which “rebounded last fall after two years of pandemic precautions, filling pediatric emergency rooms across the country,” Mike Stobbe of The Associated Press reports.

“The U.S. infant mortality rate has been worse than other high-income countries, which experts have attributed to poverty, inadequate prenatal care and other possibilities,” Stobbe notes. “But even so, the U.S. rate generally gradually improved because of medical advances and public-health efforts.”

Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams featured Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in one of his campaign ads. (Screenshot)

Perhaps the most telling TV commercial of this year’s campaigns comes from Secretary of State Michael Adams, the only Republican running for re-election.

The 30-second ad begins by showing the top of the ballot, with the slates for governor and lieutenant governor unmarked, then goes to the second race, marking Adams as the choice over former state Rep. Buddy Wheatley.

A still photo of Adams appears, and a female narrator says, “Michael Adams put partisanship aside and brought us more days to vote.” That’s a message that in most states would be coming from a Democrat. Then Kentucky’s chief Democrat, Gov. Andy Beshear, appears for five seconds, calling Adams “a good, bipartisan partner.” An alternate version has a photo of Adams and Beshear shaking hands. Both say Adams “made it harder to cheat.”

The images are from 2020, when Beshear used his pandemic emergency powers to strike a deal with Adams to delay the primary election and hold it mainly by mail, then make a general-election agreement for no-excuse absentee voting and three weeks of early voting, a new thing for Kentucky. In 2021 the Republican-run legislature limited early voting to three days, but made other reforms, and as The New York Times headline in Adams’ ad says, Kentucky was “the only red state to expand voting rights” in 2021.

A Republican ad with the Democratic incumbent and the Times nameplate made tongues wag. Some observers saw it as Adams’ clear declaration of independence from the election-denying elements of his party, staking out his place as a moderate Republican; others wondered if he was going all out for Democratic votes to be the top vote-getter among all candidates in the election.

“I want to get as many votes as I can; that’s the job of any candidate,” Adams told me. He said the ads are running only in markets where Beshear leads Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

Other Republican candidates may be vying for the title of top vote-getter, which could be more valuable than usual if Cameron and his running mate, state Sen. Robby Mills, are the only Republicans who lose statewide Tuesday. That seemed likelier than not as this was written a week before the election. Such an outcome would re-deal Kentucky’s GOP cards for elections in 2024, 2026 and 2027.

“There’s going to be a lot of transition in Kentucky the next five years in terms of openings for various offices,” Adams said.

The third race on the ballot, for attorney general, pits former U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman against Democratic state Rep. Pam Stevenson. This didn’t look like a contest until Stevenson’s campaign and a pro-Stevenson group got $142,000 from London Mayor Ronald Weddle, soon after he got $202,000 in refunds from Beshear’s campaign and the state Democratic Party because the contributions reported as coming from others were actually made through a credit card belonging to Weddle and his wife. All this was reported by Tom Loftus in the Kentucky Lantern. Stevenson and Coleman are now battling with TV ads.

Coleman and other Republican nominees joined Cameron’s bus tour Monday, while Beshear was joined by every other Democratic candidate, Lexington’s WKYT-TV reported. “I think you’re going to see really competitive down-ticket races,” Beshear said in Richmond. “It’s pretty exciting to see how hard they are working. In the end, though, each of these individuals has to get out and make their own case.”

In 2019, the top vote-getter was state Treasurer Allison Ball, who is running for state auditor against Democratic newcomer Kim Reeder. Another contender for this year’s vote-getting champion is former state House Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell, whose opponent is Democrat Sierra Enlow. Both of those Republicans have TV campaigns; Shell’s is more memorable, but just plain silly, saying he will “stop Biden and save Kentucky,” and he is shunning news-media interviews and wouldn’t even appear with Enlow on KET.

Mark Metcalf, the Republican nominee for treasurer, also spouts partisan irrelevancies, but at least he appeared with Democratic nominee Michael Bowman on the network.

In the governor’s race, Beshear continues to benefit from the power of incumbency, which has given him much more money for advertising on TV and direct mail, and it looks unlikely that former president Donald Trump, who endorsed Cameron in the primary, will make a personal appearance for Cameron.

But the Cameron campaign appears to have found a way to wake up Trump supporters without motivating anti-Trump voters: a video instead of a visit. On Tuesday, Trump supporters got a video of the repeatedly-indicted politician endorsing the state’s chief law-enforcement officer, and a poll released Friday morning showed the race as a dead heat.

I’ll be on KET election night to talk about these races and their personalities with host Renee Shaw, Democrats Bob Babbage and Matt Jones, and Republicans Trey Grayson and Scott Jennings. We’ll have plenty to talk about!

This commentary has been updated with information about the latest poll.

Al Cross’ column is republished from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Republican Daniel Cameron's campaign released an ad Wednesday touting what it called former President Donald Trump’s “complete and total endorsement” of Cameron for Kentucky governor. (Cameron ad screenshot)

As it nears its final fortnight, the Kentucky governor’s race might seem one of the biggest wastes of money in our state’s history. More than $40 million has been spent, much of it for mostly misleading TV attacks on Gov. Andy Beshear, who seems to have withstood them or gotten stronger.

That must vex Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who roared through his primary and looked to have the momentum needed to catch the Democratic incumbent in a Republican state. But after a post-primary poll that was a statistical dead heat, Beshear has led every public poll since.

As this was written Wednesday, the latest public poll was taken Oct. 1-3 by Emerson College of Boston. It said Beshear led with 49% to Cameron’s 33% – a result that some observers dismissed as an outlier, one of those polls that don’t fit the standard 19-out-of-20, “95% confidence level” of survey research. (The poll’s error margin was plus or minus 4.6 percentage points, meaning the margin could have been as close as 7 points, not 16.)

Even if the poll was an outlier, it was also an indicator – that Cameron was still not getting the traction he needs, despite the expenditure of millions of dollars on his behalf. There are several likely reasons for that, but also some less likely reasons that he still has a chance.

After 48 years of paying close attention to gubernatorial elections in this state, my head and my gut tell me that Beshear has a powerful combination going for him: Voters made up their minds about him long ago, during the crucibles of the pandemic and natural disasters, so they aren’t really paying much attention to Cameron and all those TV ads – or, unfortunately, to the series of Beshear-Cameron debates that will end on Tuesday. As Beshear said in the debate at Paducah, “You know who I am.”

Once Kentucky voters make up their minds about a governor or gubernatorial candidate, it’s difficult to change them. One example: As the 1991 Democratic primary geared up, then-Lt. Gov. Brereton Jones had a poll that showed him with 37% of the vote; he ended up winning with 37.5%, merely maintaining the support he had gained by casting himself as the opposite number to controversial Gov. Wallace Wilkinson for three years.

Many Kentuckians don’t think much about Frankfort politicians because they hear relatively little about them, living in media markets that are centered in other states or with news media whose news outlets must pay attention to other states (Louisville being the leading example). And in the age of social media and Donald Trump, national news grabs even more of voters’ limited attention.

Cameron is trying to nationalize the race by linking Beshear to President Biden, without much apparent effect. But he has Trump’s endorsement, and has begun using it in TV ads, which suggests that the quadruple-indicted former president and serial scofflaw will make a campaign appearance for Kentucky’s chief law-enforcement officer. That is a sad farce. But Trump remains popular in the state, leading Biden 55% to 26% in the Emerson poll, which found another absurdity: 47% of Kentucky’s likely voters think Biden stole the 2020 election while only 36% think he won it fairly, contrary to the best evidence.

Trump remains the X factor in the race. An appearance by him could boost Republican turnout, as he did in the 6th Congressional District in 2018, but it could also boost turnout among Democrats – and Republicans who detest what Trump has done to their party. The Emerson poll had 28% of Republicans favoring Beshear.

But in the end, Cameron’s chances depend on his ability to sell himself to voters and get them to the polls. His emphasis on gender issues seems not to have worked; he has yet to consolidate the Republican base behind him, and he is whipsawed by the abortion issue.

Cameron’s latest salient is crime, noting that most of the felons Beshear released in the pandemic ended up committing more crimes. (It’s a companion to his issue of low test scores after school closures.) Beshear has been reluctant to relitigate his pandemic work, perhaps fearing that it would change the narrative of the race, but in Monday night’s debate he responded to Cameron’s point, saying “the vast majority” of those crimes were committed after the inmates would have been free anyway; they had to be within six months of release or older than 65 and medically vulnerable to get out.

Serious crime is down under Beshear, but crime is a top concern of voters, a WKYT-TV poll found. Cameron’s new running mate, in effect, is former U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman, who is running for attorney general against state Rep. Pam Stevenson of Louisville and is bankrolling a tough-on-crime TV campaign. That could give Cameron some traction. But he’s fast running out of time.

This column is republished from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron, right, and running mate Robby Mills bow their heads in prayer during the Graves County Republican Party Breakfast, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Two months ago, I began gathering string to write about abortion and Attorney General Daniel Cameron, after he seemed to have a problem dealing with the issue. Now he’s having bigger problems.

The day before the annual Fancy Farm Picnic, the Republican nominee for governor spoke to about 25 people at a hilltop park that is home to the huge memorial cross at Wickliffe, where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi.

After Cameron finished his standard campaign pitch, the event’s organizer asked him to talk about “one of my favorite subjects, which is abortion, to do away with abortion.” She mentioned that she’s one of 11 children, and said “Your fight against abortion means a lot.”

Cameron still uttered not a word about abortion, simply saying, “God bless you all. Thank you all. Thank you so much.”

It appears now that Cameron and his campaign team were still trying to figure out how to deal with the issue, and he’s still fumbling the ball. Here’s the background:

Abortion stopped being an easy issue for Republicans over a year ago. That’s when their dog caught the car and the U.S. Supreme Court said there was no federal constitutional right to abortion, striking down the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision.

That threw the issue to the states, and anti-abortion activists pressed statehouse Republicans for tough restrictions. The politicians caved, fearing any weakness on the issue would open them up to primary challenges, many in districts so gerrymandered that primaries are decisive.

Kentucky Republicans had already passed a “trigger law” to take effect if and when Roe was overturned. It bans abortion unless there is a threat to the woman’s life, with no additional exceptions for cases of rape or incest. All those exceptions were once the mainstream Republican position.

But in the new world of abortion politics, Republicans fear giving primary foes any openings on the issue. That appeared to be Cameron’s thinking when he told Northern Kentucky Right to Life, the state’s most zealous anti-abortion group, that he supported the trigger law as it stands.

That was in the primary. Now, Cameron is running uphill against Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who generally supports abortion rights but is making an issue of Cameron’s opposition to rape and incest exceptions. The fact that a Democrat is running on an abortion issue shows how the Supreme Court moved the ball to the other side of the field and put Republicans on the defensive.

Cameron needs turnout from both the anti-abortion base and moderates, especially women. The latter requires showing that he’s not a zealot. So, on Sept. 18, he said on WHAS Radio that he would sign a bill adding rape and incest exceptions to the law.

“No question about it,” he said. But there was one, left unasked. Would he seek such a bill? He finally had to answer that question Sept. 27 when a woman in London expressed disappointment with his Sept. 18 statement. He said what he really meant was that he would support the exceptions only “if the courts made us change that law. . . . It wouldn’t be me, proactively.”

Such a court ruling is inconceivable, and Cameron knows it. One wonders if he knew he was being recorded by the woman, apparently a liberal activist masquerading as an abortion opponent. Cameron could have been accused of masquerading as a lawyer.

Regardless of how it happened, the encounter revealed Cameron as a candidate who obfuscates and misleads on an issue many voters care deeply about.?

Turning the tables, Cameron’s campaign said his opponent should tell voters “on what week (in a pregnancy) would Andy Beshear protect the unborn.” Beshear’s campaign said he “has always supported reasonable restrictions, especially on late-term procedures.”

Don’t look for Beshear to answer Cameron’s question about weeks, though he should.

Last year, before Roe was overturned, he vetoed a bill that had a ban after the 15th week, saying it was probably unconstitutional for other reasons, while highlighting its lack of a rape-and-incest exception. The legislature overrode his veto, and this year sat on a bill that would have added the exception.

Both candidates want to have it both ways. Cameron shows some sympathy for the exception in order to attract moderates, but not so much that he turns off voters like the woman at Wickliffe. Beshear stays vague on a big issue while rightly depicting Cameron as a would-be governor who won’t advance the position held by most voters.

Ironically, Cameron is in this tight spot due to the Supreme Court, which has the members it does and makes the rulings it does in large measure because it was refashioned by Cameron’s political mentor, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. In this case, the law of unintended consequences works in Beshear’s favor.

This column is republished from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Kentucky's 58th governor, Brereton Jones will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Monday. (KET screenshot)

Kentucky never had a governor quite like Brereton Jones, who died Monday, and it may never again. His legacy is one of reform, with lessons for reformers.

Jones wasn’t the first high-minded millionaire to use wealth to gain high office, but he did it with a most unusual pedigree. His political career began in West Virginia, where he was Republican leader of the state House, but he left politics for Kentucky and horses, his great love. He married into a prestigious Kentucky family and became a Democrat, cut a wide swath in the Thoroughbred industry, and started a foundation to provide health care to the needy.

That fed his wish to be governor, an audacious ambition for a recent transplant to Kentucky, so he ran for lieutenant governor, freely acknowledging that if elected he would run for governor. At the time, statewide constitutional officeholders couldn’t succeed themselves, and Kentuckians were in the habit of looking for fresh faces in politics. That, and Jones’ self-financing of a campaign with top-notch advertising, helped him win a primary against three statewide elected officials and Paul Patton, then the Pike County judge-executive and another self-financing millionaire.

Another one, Wallace Wilkinson, won the governorship. He wanted a constitutional amendment to let him seek re-election, and he and Jones clashed repeatedly. Wilkinson was an old-fashioned “reward your friends and punish your enemies” governor, and Jones cast himself as the antidote to a style of politics that had worn thin with many voters. As governor, he instituted a code of ethics for the executive branch, took much of the politics out of state contracting and appointment of higher-education boards, and pushed health-care reform.

But he never quite adapted to politics.

The 1992 General Assembly was already in a reform mood, passing a law that match-funded campaigns of gubernatorial candidates who limited spending, and a succession amendment that was adopted in large measure because Jones excluded himself, perhaps his greatest political legacy.

But when an FBI sting of legislators was revealed, Jones said the probe “is going to be a good thing. From time to time I think you have to clean out the system.” The remark angered many legislators, and Jones had more conflicts with them. He vetoed the budget they passed in 1994 after going on statewide TV in an effort to pass his version of it and a plan for universal health coverage.

“He was too straightforward, too honest, to be a really great politician, but he was a good governor,” said Tracy Farmer, a former state Democratic chair who is also in the Thoroughbred business in Woodford County. Farmer noted that Jones left the state with a big surplus, a reduced payroll, and a renewed commitment to environmental protection, which was driven partly by first lady Elizabeth “Libby” Lloyd Jones.

The limited health-reform plan Jones did get passed fell apart when most insurance companies left the state, and health-care advocates said Jones’ follow-through was lacking, but he deserves credit for tackling the issue, said Phillip Shepherd, who ran the environment cabinet for Jones and is now a circuit judge in Frankfort.

“While it lasted, it was a lifesaver for thousands and thousands of Kentuckians who were uninsurable” due to pre-existing conditions, Shepherd said. “Everything he spent political capital on was to level the playing field, to give people an opportunity to have a voice where they didn’t have a voice before.”

Figuratively, Jones often rode a white horse, but on such a steed, every speck of dirt stands out. He seemed unable to understand the criticism he received for being a major beneficiary of a program he started to reward Kentucky breeders of stakes races, and the role of the news media in holding public officials accountable. He was overly sensitive to any suggestion of moral shortcoming, often part of the give and take of politics.

Jones never became a professional politician, and did some things that pros found amateurish, such as asking three men who wanted to be state fire marshal to go in a room and talk it out. But politics also needs citizens who offer themselves for public service and are willing to leave it, forsaking future glory.

Jones came very close to running for governor in 2007, when scandal-plagued Republican Ernie Fletcher had little chance to win a second term, but got cold feet. He had much encouragement, but “really didn’t want to do it again,” said Farmer. “I don’t think he wanted to go through that running again; he wanted to do what he enjoyed. … The thing he really loved was the Thoroughbred industry and the horses and his farms.” That’s where Jones had his greatest success, but as governor he left his adopted state better than he found it. For that and more, he deserves our thanks.

This column is republished from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell extends a hand to President Joe Biden in Covington at a celebration of funding for the Brent Spence Bridge project, Jan. 4, 2023. (Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Michael Clubb)

Mitch McConnell, who has a policy of saying little, is exactly nine months older than Joe Biden, who says too much and will be 81 on Nov. 20. The president’s rambling makes some people worry about his health, but we know a lot more about it than we do about the Senate Republican leader’s, even after recent freeze-ups forced him to reveal more than ever. But in both their cases, it’s still not quite enough.

The need to know is different, because their jobs are different. Biden is an all-but-declared candidate for re-election by all voters next year; McConnell is almost halfway through his seventh six-year term as a senator, and his recent neurological episodes probably ensure that he will not face Kentucky’s voters again. But he is also serving a two-year term as Senate party leader, where the voters are his fellow Republican senators, who can keep a closer eye on him than any Kentucky voter except his wife, Elaine Chao.

At least publicly, most GOP senators seemed satisfied with the explanation McConnell gave in a private lunch: a public statement from Capitol physician Brian Monahan saying neurologists had found no evidence of a stroke or seizure, and his own statement that the two freezes caught on camera were the only ones he has had.

But why would McConnell freeze up when appearing before reporters, once while beginning a statement in the Capitol and once while taking questions in Northern Kentucky? And what caused these episodes five weeks apart?

Fox News reporter Chad Pegram, on whom McConnell called to open the Capitol presser, asked the right questions: “Can you tell us what is afflicting you, and describe, characterize, what is the level of transparency that the people of Kentucky deserve to hear about your condition?”

McConnell said, “I think Dr. Monahan covered –

Pegram interjected, “We’d like to hear it from you.”

McConnell replied, “I know, you are hearing from me. I think Dr. Monahan covered the subject fully. You had a chance to read it. I don’t have anything to add to it, and I think it should answer any reasonable question.

Pegram pressed: “He ruled things out. He didn’t tell us what it might have been. Do you know what it is?”

McConnell chuckled lightly, turned away and pointed to CNN’s Manu Raju.

“You’ve had all these evaluations,” Raju said. “What have doctors said is the precise medical reason for those two freezeups?”

McConnell replied, “What Dr. Monahan’s report addressed was concerns people might have that some things had happened to me did happen. Well, they didn’t, and really, I have nothing to add to that. I think he pretty well covered the subject.”

Asked if he planned to retire anytime soon, McConnell chortled and said “I have no announcements to make on that subject.” When the reporter started another question, McConnell interrupted with an announcement after all: ”I’m going to finish my term as leader and I’m going to? finish my Senate term. Thank you.” Then he stepped away from the microphone.

That was a typical McConnell brushoff, but the McConnell in the video of the presser is not the sharp, fluid Mitch McConnell we saw before the fall and concussion that kept him away from the Senate for four months this year. We need to hear from his neurologists, not a doctor whose office has a reputation, deserved or not, for protecting members, and who used the imprecise medical term “lightheadedness” in his letter to the senator.

We did hear from an ophthalmologist: Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who was a McConnell ally only when it served their mutual purposes. He separated himself even further by doubting his seatmate’s explanation and venturing an opinion on a patient he had not examined (as far as we know): “This looks like a seizure.”?

And we heard from another physician in the Senate, Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, on “Meet the Press” Sunday. Asked about Paul’s statement, he said, “I’m a gastroenterologist; he’s an ophthalmologist. We’re not the internist who’s doing the physical exam, and you have to accept the limitations of training.”

Cassidy said he has enough health information about McConnell, who “has handled it perfectly,” but then said members of Congress and the president should release their neurological information.

The latest detailed report from Biden’s doctor, in February, mentioned no brain-related issues. It came 15 months after the previous report; at Biden’s age, more frequent reports are needed.

McConnell, who has always been private about his health, is trying to keep the government open and keep helping Ukraine at the same time he is not only dealing with health issues but questions about them. And he would like to rid his party of former-President Trump. It’s a heavy load for a leader struggling to hold on. Let’s wish him well.

This article is published with permission from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, reaches out to help Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after McConnell froze and stopped talking at the microphone during a news conference after a lunch meeting with Senate Republicans at the U.S. Capitol, July 26, 2023. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Even if Mitch McConnell’s health prevents him from accomplishing his stated goal of serving as Senate Republican leader through 2024, he will still be the longest-serving Senate leader of any party, one who remade the federal judiciary from top to bottom.

The impact of that achievement will outlive the 81-year-old Kentuckian, who appeared to freeze during two recent public appearances, one in July 2023 at the U.S. Capitol and then again on Aug. 30 while talking with reporters at an event in his home state. His doctor has said the episodes are part of the normal recovery from a concussion McConnell experienced in March, but political circles are concerned about his ability to continue to serve.

His success could hardly have been predicted when Senate Republicans elected McConnell as their leader in 2006. For most of the 40-plus years I have watched McConnell, first as a reporter covering Kentucky politics and now as a journalism professor focused on rural issues, he seemed to have no great ambition or goals, other than gaining power and keeping it.

He always cared about the courts, though. In 1987, after Democrats defeated Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, McConnell warned that if a Democratic president “sends up somebody we don’t like” to a Republican-controlled Senate, the GOP would follow suit. He fulfilled that threat in 2016, refusing to confirm Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court.

Keeping that vacancy open helped elect Donald Trump. Two people could hardly be more different, and they are now at odds, but the taciturn McConnell and the voluble Trump have at least one thing in common: They want power.

Trump had exercised his power with what often seems like reckless audacity, but McConnell’s 36-year Senate tenure is built on his calculated audacity.

McConnell’s political rise

It was audacious, back in 1977, to think that a wonky lawyer who had been disqualified from his only previous campaign for public office could defeat a popular two-term county executive in Louisville.

McConnell ran anyway.

It was audacious to think that a Republican could get the local labor council to endorse him in that race, but he got it, by leading the members to believe he would help them get collective bargaining for public employees.

McConnell won the race. He didn’t pursue collective bargaining.

Seven years later, it was audacious to think that an urbanite who wore loafers to dusty, gravelly county fairs and lacked a compelling personality could unseat a popular two-term Kentucky senator, especially when he trailed by 40 points in August. But McConnell won.

As soon as he won a second term in 1990, McConnell started trying to climb the Senate leadership ladder, facilitated in large measure by his willingness to be the point man on campaign finance issues, an area his colleagues feared. They reacted emotionally to this touchy issue; he studied it, owned it and moved higher in the leadership.

Business, not service

In politics, lack of emotion is usually a drawback. McConnell makes up for that by having command of the rules and the facts and a methodical attitude.

The recording on his home phone once said, “This is Mitch McConnell. You’ve reached my home. If this call is about business, please call my office.”

Business. Not something like “my service to you in the United States Senate,” but “business.”

This lack of emotion keeps McConnell disciplined. I am not the only person he has told, “The most important word in the English language is ‘focus,’ because if you don’t focus, you don’t get anything done.”

Four years ago, I spoke to the McConnell Scholars, the political-leadership program he started at the University of Louisville. One thank-you gift was a letter opener bearing two words: focus and humility. The first word was no surprise, because of McConnell’s well-known maxim; the second one intrigued me.

The director of the program, Gary Gregg, says adding “humility” was his idea. But it fits the founder. With his studied approach and careful reticence, McConnell is the opposite of bombast, and that surely helped him gain the Republican leader’s job and stay there. He has occasionally described his colleagues as prima donnas who look in the mirror and see a president, something he claims to have never done.

When the colleagues in your party caucus know you are focused on their interests and not your own, you can keep getting reelected leader, as McConnell has done without opposition every two years since 2006.

McConnell’s Supreme Court

McConnell’s caucus trusts him. When he saw Obama as an existential threat – someone who could bring back enough moderate Democrats to give the party a long-term governing majority – McConnell held the caucus together in opposition to Obamacare, and Republicans used that as an issue to rouse their base in the 2010 midterm election.

Meanwhile, McConnell was working on the federal judiciary. He and his colleagues slow-walked and filibustered Obama’s nominees, requiring “aye” votes from 60 of the 100 senators to confirm each one. The process consumed so much time that then-Majority Leader Harry Reid abolished the filibuster for nominations, except those to the Supreme Court.

That sped up the process, allowing Obama to appoint 323 judges, about as many as George W. Bush. But Republicans’ additional delaying tactics still left 105 vacancies for Trump to fill.

When Democrats weakened the filibuster, McConnell warned, “You’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”

A decade later, Democrats may concede that point. McConnell and Trump put nearly 200 judges on the federal courts, making them all the more a white-male bastion of judicial conservatism.

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016 and McConnell said the seat wouldn’t be filled until after the November election, it was another case of calculated audacity.

Democrats cried foul, but they were powerless to reverse his decision because Republicans stuck with him.

Trump’s 2016 victory preserved the Senate Republican majority, which then did away with the Supreme Court exception, allowing McConnell and his colleagues to install by simple majority vote the sort of Supreme Court justices they wanted: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

It is the Roberts Court, but it is also the McConnell Court.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. It is an updated version of an article originally published Oct. 1, 2020.

Congressman James Comer fist pumps to the crowd during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic on Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Republicans snubbed Hal Rogers, more than once. They treated Thomas Massie more roughly. Brett Guthrie deferred his dream. James Comer defeated two colleagues in an election to get one of the highest-profile jobs in Congress.

But you don’t read about much or most of the news made by these members of Kentucky’s congressional delegation, unless you subscribe to one of the high-priced newsletters from Washington — or the Almanac of American Politics, which just published its 2024 edition ($130 hardback, $94 paperback, $64 e-book). That’s because no Kentucky news organization has a reporter in Washington whose sole job is covering Kentucky’s delegation.

Enter the latest biannual Almanac, which for decades has been the go-to reference for facts and cogent analysis of politics in this country. Its biographies of Kentucky’s delegation members, and Gov. Andy Beshear, not only remind us of the high and low points in their careers and the nature of their jurisdictions, but bring us up to date on where Kentucky’s six House members fit in the 435-member chamber.

The longest-serving House member is Rogers, of Somerset, who was first elected to represent the 5th District in 1980. His Appalachian bailiwick is one of the poorest in the nation, and he may have done more than any other House member to bring home federal help. But when he hit the three-term limit as chair of the Appropriations Committee, he found himself in less favor with his colleagues.

The Almanac reports that in 2017, Rogers became chair of the appropriations subcommittee that handles the budget of the State Department and other foreign operations: “That was an unusual rebuke of an influential and senior House Republican. As McClatchy News earlier reported, Rogers wanted to chair the defense subcommittee.” When that seat opened up after the 2018 elections, “that gave Rogers a new opportunity. … Instead, Ken Calvert of California took the defense slot,” which he still holds. Now Rogers again oversees the subcommittee on commerce, justice, science and related agencies.

Massie, who was Lewis County judge-executive when he was elected from the 4th District in 2012, has the level of seniority to lead a committee or major subcommittee, but “has been a constant thorn to Republican leaders, who repeatedly bypassed him for chairmanships, and a free-spirit libertarian who often goes his own way,” the Almanac reports. He finally got a chairmanship this year, of the antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, “though the election was at least as much a rejection of Rep. Ken Buck, the senior Republican in that slot, who many Republicans believed had become too vigorous in his support of antitrust enforcement. They won’t need to worry about Massie.”

Massie’s more important post may be his new seat on the Rules Committee, which he won by backing Kevin McCarthy for speaker, and where he cast a pivotal vote in May to send the bipartisan debt-ceiling package to the House floor, contrary to his budget-hawk history.

An MIT-trained engineer with many patents, Massie chaired the technology subcommittee in his first term, but his iconoclastic, independent approach cost him leadership positions for almost a decade, says the Almanac: “ On two

occasions in 2020, when there was an opening for the top Republican on the Oversight and Reform Committee,

GOP leaders twice bypassed Massie — once to select a junior Kentuckian, James Comer,” first elected in 2016. Comer’s bio notes he “defeated Reps. Jody Hice of Georgia and freshman Mark Green of Tennessee.”

The chairmanship has given Comer, of the far-flung 1st District, the highest profile of any Kentuckian in Washington this year except Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. Comer’s committee is investigating Hunter Biden’s dealings and their possible connections to the president and other family members.

In his speech at the Aug. 5 Fancy Farm Picnic, Comer complained that Kentucky’s four largest newspapers have ignored the probe. But closer scrutiny of Comer would have also shown that he has spent much time on partisan “news” outlets touting such things as an FBI report of an unverified tip saying millions in bribes had gone to the president and his son. And he failed to rein in Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia when she displayed pictures of sex acts involving Hunter Biden at a committee meeting.

Guthrie, first elected from Bowling Green and the 2nd District in 2008, gets a favorable writeup in the Almanac, which reports that he deferred to more senior members when the top Republican spot on the Energy and Commerce Committee opened up in 2020. He recently became chair of its health subcommittee, and “has shown skill in working across the aisle,” the Almanac says. But his constituents, and those of his colleagues, deserve to know more about what they’re doing in Washington. As Louisville’s Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”

This commentary has been corrected to say that no Kentucky news organization has a reporter in Washington whose sole job is covering Kentucky’s congressional delegation.

This article is published with permission from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Gov. Andy Beshear and Attorney General Daniel Cameron shared the stage briefly at the Fancy Farm Picnic, with master of ceremonies David Beckon (center). (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

This article is published with permission from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

FANCY FARM, Kentucky – The first faceoff of the candidates for governor, at last Saturday’s Fancy Farm Picnic, brought the race into clearer focus.

Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron is betting that culture will trump politics, as it often has in Kentucky, and that voters will change their minds about Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who is running on his record as one of the nation’s most popular governors.

Both candidates implicitly claim the moral high ground, differently defined.

In his five-minute speech, Cameron said “values” four times, and made eight references to transgender people. That reflected Republicans’ legislative political strategy, sending Beshear veto-bait bills targeting transgender youth; and the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns by the two outside political committees supporting Cameron.

Those ads are misleading, as the Courier Journal’s Joe Sonka explained last month, but have had some effect. Two Public Opinion Strategies polls showed Beshear’s lead narrowing to within the last poll’s error margin; and Beshear has started his first attack ad, saying the ads aren’t true, citing Sonka’s article and noting Cameron’s support for public funding of private schools.

The surprising aspect of the ad is that the attack is delivered by Beshear himself, speaking directly to camera and calling Cameron by name. Negative advertising is inherently risky, but Beshear and his advisers apparently believe he has such a reservoir of support and trust that he can deflect the attack merely by denying it himself — and noting somewhat indignantly, “I’m a deacon in my church.”(That’s the Disciples of Christ, generally known as the Christian Church.)

That’s the sort of approach that is available to a popular incumbent whose high job approval seems baked in. It held around 60% for more than a year, well after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic — his response to which appears largely responsible for his high ratings. Beshear’s daily news conferences in the first few months of the pandemic took him into Kentuckians’ homes in a way no governor ever had before. They’re on a first-name basis; his signs emphasize “Andy.”

Apparently to undercut that, Cameron said at the picnic that there is “TV Andy” and “the real Andy,” who “vetoes tax cuts [and] protects transgender surgeries for kids.” (Not really; surgery was in the latest anti-transgender bill Beshear vetoed, but he says such surgeries didn’t happen in Kentucky anyway, and he opposes them. Tuesday, it was revealed that the University of Kentucky said it “has performed a small number of non-genital gender reassignment surgeries on minors,” Kentucky Today reported.)

Hoping some voters have buyer’s remorse about Beshear’s handling of the pandemic, Cameron and other Republicans label him “the shutdown governor” and note that he sent state troopers to take plate numbers of, and put warning notices on, cars outside the very few churches that held in-person services in April 2020.

Beshear has generally avoided discussing his pandemic work in the last year, but now he assumes the moral high ground, telling audiences that he thought his 2019 race was “about right versus wrong,” but turned out to be “about life versus death.” He told a dinner crowd, “Thank you for helping us win that election and saving thousands of lives.”

He also assumed the moral high ground at the picnic, saying “This race is the difference between vision and DI-vision.” At the dinner, he used a similar line and added, “On that other side, you see a fostering of anger, even see them encouraging people to violate that Golden Rule, encouraging one Kentuckian to hate each other.” To both audiences, he said, “I’m ready to prove that’s a losing strategy in the commonwealth of Kentucky.”

But even as he claimed the moral high ground, Beshear gave Cameron Saturday’s toughest shot after he followed him to the Fancy Farm lectern: “It’s not true. It’s all lies. But if you’re willing to lie about a grand jury, he’s willing to lie to you.”

The pronouns didn’t match, but here’s what he meant: After the grand jury in the Breonna Taylor case did not indict either officer who burst in on the Louisville woman and her boyfriend, killing her, an anonymous juror asked the judge to let him or her discuss the proceedings, disputing Cameron’s assertion that “the grand jury agreed” that the officers were “justified in the return of deadly fire after being fired upon.”

Beshear was returning fire of another kind; Cameron said “TV Andy lies about his record on jobs, crime and teachers. TV Andy wants you to believe he’s never heard of Joe Biden.”

And that’s the biggest X factor in the race: national politics as defined by Donald Trump, who has made Kentucky a very red state, the major exceptions being Beshear and his father Steve, a two-term governor. Trump has endorsed Cameron, who won’t answer questions about Trump’s latest indictment. Can the state’s chief law-enforcement officer really hold the moral high ground while he is embraced by Trump? Or does Trump still trump when voters vote?

Three pews of the jam-packed Harned Methodist Church were reserved with drawings of a black sheep, recalling Joe Wright’s role as a member of the “Black Sheep Squadron,” lawmakers who ended governors’ domination of the Kentucky legislature. (Photo by Al Cross)

HARNED, Ky. – At the funeral for one of Kentucky’s greater public servants in living memory, no speaker said a word about his service to the state.

Joe Wright, who was probably the most powerful member of a legislature he helped make independent from the governor, was remembered as a farmer and family man, always his top priorities. His life has lessons for us.

Three pews of the jam-packed Harned Methodist Church last Friday were reserved with drawings of a black sheep, recalling Wright’s role as a member of the “Black Sheep Squadron,” which ended governors’ domination of the legislature.

Taking on powerful Gov. Julian Carroll, who led the 1975 ticket on which they were elected, was an audacious move for a newly elected legislator whose only elective service had been school-board member, but Wright said years later, “I didn’t have any interest in being part of something that I didn’t think I could influence.”

Wright had a low profile as the Black Sheep took over the Senate in the 1979 special session, but was unanimously elected to the leadership that fall – at the same time Gov.-elect John Y. Brown Jr. wisely decided not to challenge the legislature’s newfound independence. When Black Sheep leader John Berry retired in 1981, Wright was elected majority floor leader and held the job for 11 years, longer than anyone before or since.

In that role, Wright was a key to convincing skeptics that the part-time legislature could be trusted to do the people’s business. The House also became independent, but had more turnover; under Wright and Senate President John “Eck” Rose, the Senate was the stabilizer – especially when Gov. Wallace Wilkinson tried to browbeat legislators into changing the state constitution so he could succeed himself.

In 1990, the legislature and Wilkinson struck a deal to pass the Kentucky Education Reform Act with a 1-cent sales-tax increase and give Wilkinson the bond issue he wanted to build roads. And in 1992, when then-Gov. Brereton Jones exempted himself from the succession amendment, the legislature and the voters passed it. The legislature also passed voluntary spending limits and public financing in governor’s races, and Wright’s support and steering were key to all these things. He was known for persuading colleagues while keeping their respect.

The floor leader’s job seemed to be Wright’s for as long as he wanted it, but he passed up re-election to the Senate in 1992, saying it took too much time from his family and his farm – ironically, he said, because of legislative independence. In his farewell speech, he endorsed the part-time, citizen legislature:

“I’m a farmer. . . . Every true farmer’s goal is to leave the land a little better for my stewardship, a little more prepared to do the work of the good earth, a little more fertile for whoever follows. That is the covenant of farming. Just as there is a covenant of farming, there is a covenant of public service. And just as farming is more stewardship than ownership, so is public service. I do not own this seat. I’ve held it for a while.”

Wright told his colleagues that they would be judged “on the basis of how healthy, or how poor, is the soil of our democracy as symbolized by the health of this institution.” But he also had to acknowledge that a bribery scandal had hit the legislature that month: “With legislative independence has come explosive growth in the attention this body receives from special interests.”

(At the funeral, there was one public mention of politics, from granddaughter Elena Wright, who said she asked “Pappy” about his political career and he told her about his 1996 race for Congress, a quixotic effort surely spurred by a close ally, then-U.S. Sen. Wendell Ford. She quoted her Pappy as saying, “I was upset for about six hours, but after that, it was over.” Wright wanted to run for governor in 1995, but couldn’t find the running mate he wanted – a requirement of the 1992 amendment, another irony.)

Less than a decade after Wright left Frankfort, the General Assembly persuaded voters to let it meet every year, making it less of a citizen legislature. And though the partisan shift in recent years has brought more turnover in membership, too much legislating seems aimed at keeping individuals and their parties in power.

In 50 years of watching politics, I’ve liked to believe that most people enter it for the right reasons: to help their community, to further a worthy cause, to give back to a society that has been good to them. But once elected, too many stay in politics for the wrong reasons, selfish ones, mainly staying in office. They should be willing to do the right thing and walk away, as Joe Wright did.

This column is republished ?from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, just turning 82, has $8 million in his reelection campaign, though political insiders doubt he will seek another term in 2026. (Getty Images)

This is mainly about political money, and a little bit about taxpayers’ money getting political.

Most of the recent action in the governor’s race has been about campaign contributions, and both Gov. Andy Beshear and Attorney General Daniel Cameron have some ’splainin’ to do.

On June 20, my old friend and colleague Tom Loftus reported in the Kentucky Lantern that Beshear’s campaign and the state Democratic Party had refunded $202,000 in excess contributions from relatives of London Mayor Randall Weddle and employees of a business he co-founded.

It was a real head-slapper, to repeat a phrase that Tom likes to use in conversation. For one thing, the campaign and the party reported that Weddle’s bunch, none of whom had ever made a large political contribution, gave $305,500, an amount Tom revealed in a Lantern story on April 17.

Beshear’s campaign wouldn’t answer questions for that story, but more than two months later, campaign manager Eric Hyers said “that the campaign recently determined all of that money was donated on a credit card of Randall Weddle and his wife,” Tom reported in his second story on June 20.

That was another head-slapper, because any political operation needs to say “whoa” when a contributor uses the same credit card to make a series of huge donations in the names of different people, which is apparently what happened. After first saying that “the donors” had raised the issue, Hyers told Tom in an email that in fact it was Weddle who “informed the campaign that contributions were made in excess of contribution limits,” and that the campaign “promptly” refunded the money.

Clearly, it wasn’t promptly enough. As Tom noted, “It is illegal for any person to exceed the donation limits by making excess contributions in the names of other people.”

The Weddle group was one of several in the “reverse logistics/liquidation business which re-sells merchandise that has been returned by the original buyer,” Tom reported in April. Weddle, using double negatives, told him that Beshear “has never asked me, or my family, for nothing. And we’ve never asked him for nothing.” The Beshear campaign said it would start checking online contributions for excess amounts. Duh.

Cameron, precluded from investigating Beshear because he’s running against him, asked the FBI to investigate. Then, quickly, Beshear’s party was able to ask the same thing.

On June 22, Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast reported that Cameron’s campaign took $6,900 from a Morehead drug-treatment firm his office was investigating for possible Medicaid fraud. The Associated Press reported that officials of the firm said Cameron had “directly solicited” the contributions, which were made online and refunded after the conflict of interest was realized.

Cameron said he was unaware of his office’s investigation of the firm, which made him look about as feckless as Beshear’s campaign.

Such dueling allegations tend to cancel each other out in voters’ minds, but Cameron needs to bone up on an episode that occurred in 1991, when he was 5 years old.

Two weeks before the primary election, Attorney General Fred Cowan was the clear favorite for lieutenant governor, the last time that office was independently elected. Then it was revealed (again by Tom Loftus, then at The Courier-Journal) that Cowan’s campaign solicited contributions from a man four days after Cowan’s office subpoenaed him in a campaign-finance investigation. Paul Patton easily won the primary and became governor in 1995.

Cowan said then that he was unaware of the subpoena when he sent the letter pleading for a contribution. Sound familiar, Mr. Cameron?

Barr, Rogers brag about spending they voted against

This month, two Kentucky congressmen got away with a little audacity that is so common that it isn’t really audacious, but needs notice.

Reps. Hal Rogers of the 5th District and Andy Barr of the 6th issued press releases implying they should share credit for sizable grants made possible by the new federal infrastructure law

– legislation they voted against. That very pertinent fact wasn’t reported in any of the news stories I could find, which largely parroted official press releases.

Beshear, who works with Rogers on Appalachian matters, did him a favor by saying in his release that they both announced the $21 million to expand the major highway that impounds Panbowl Lake in Jackson. Rogers’ office said the state sought his endorsement and that he has long supported that type of funding.

Both Republicans said they had endorsed the state’s applications for the grants, and Barr said there was competition for the $8 million that will build a new railroad overpass in Lexington. But I doubt he had much pull with the Biden administration, which he regularly attacks. Here’s a line for the next such release: “While I voted against this bill, once the money was available, it was my duty to help get some of it.”

This column is republished ?from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Donald Trump, June 10, 2023 in Columbus, Georgia. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The indictment of a former president on charges of keeping secret national-security materials, refusing to give them back, and lying about them to the FBI through his lawyers, while leaving them vulnerable to espionage, creates one of the biggest stress tests ever for our political system. Some Kentucky politicians are already failing it.

Donald Trump should be considered innocent until proven guilty, and there’s no compelling reason for politicians to say anything about his indictment beyond “Let the case take its course, and let the jury decide.”

But in the political world reshaped by Trump and his ego, public performances on social media have become more important to some elected officials than doing their jobs, and Republicans who are on the way up see Trump as a ladder.

A leading practitioner of performative politics is Thomas Massie, who represents Kentucky’s 4th District, a northern arc stretching from Bardstown to Greenup County. Massie is one of the House’s brainier representatives, but is more known for using his intelligence for clever posts on Twitter – most famously the Christmas-card photo with all seven members of his family holding guns and saying “Santa, please bring ammo.”

Massie’s performative and libertarian emphases — which have put him in very small minorities in many roll-call votes — took a pause when Republicans regained control of the House and he had more opportunity to participate in actual governance. He was a key supporter of Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker and cast a pivotal Rules Committee vote to send to the full House the debt-and-spending deal McCarthy struck with President Biden.

But when Trump was indicted on 37 counts, Massie followed McCarthy’s lead in criticizing and mischaracterizing the case. Massie tweeted, “A sitting president arresting his political opponent is the ultimate weaponization of government.” McCarthy said Biden had indicted Trump; he and Massie were both off base.

The indictment came from a federal grand jury and was prepared by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has prosecuted prominent members of both parties. There’s no evidence that he’s taking directions from Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland, or that the indictment is “politically motivated,” as 6th District Rep. Andy Barr tweeted.

The other Republican members of Kentucky’s delegation have been silent on Twitter about the Trump case, but they’re not up for election this year.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron is on the ballot, as the Republican nominee against Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in the Nov. 7 election. Trump endorsed him in last month’s primary, so it was no surprise that Cameron reacted to the indictment with a statement defending Trump. But it was disappointing that the state’s chief prosecutor seems not to understand what some other prosecutors have been doing, or not doing.

Cameron issued a statement saying “Joe Biden has mishandled classified information, and so did Hillary Clinton. Where are those indictments? It appears there are two systems of justice: one for Republicans and one for Democrats.”

Actually, the cases of Biden and Clinton are very, very different from Trump’s.

About 10 classified documents from Biden’s days as vice president and senator were found last year at Biden’s think tank at the University of Pennsylvania. The Penn Biden Center notified federal officials and gave them back. Searches at Biden’s Delaware home and former office found six classified items, and a special counsel is investigating. Biden has cooperated and there have been no reports that he obstructed justice in the way Trump allegedly did. (William Barr, who was his attorney general, has said “If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.” More than 100 documents Trump took were marked “classified.”)

Clinton said in 2015 that she had used a private server in her work as secretary of state. She turned over about 30,000 emails, and the FBI found three that were marked “classified,” eight threads that had “top secret” information, and 110 emails with classified information. She said more than 1,000 other emails had been erased from the server, but in 2016, the FBI found 14,900 other emails, a similarly small number of which had classified information. Clinton apologized, after first refusing to do so. FBI Director James Comey said that no charges were appropriate, because there was no evidence that emails were intentionally deleted, and that while “We did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

Since three of four Republicans in the U.S. tell pollsters the prosecution is political, and Trump is more popular in Kentucky than the nation as a whole, we can expect more misleading, self-serving statements from Cameron and his ilk. Just recognize them for what they are: opinions and arguments, largely unsupported by facts.

This column is republished ?from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Then President Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell shown at the White House in 2017. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Daniel Cameron’s thumping victory in Tuesday’s hard-fought Republican primary makes him a stronger-than-forecast challenger to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear — not just because he won big, but because of how he got there.

Cameron led in polls from the start, thanks to his name recognition as Kentucky’s attorney general and his national-level status as the first Black Kentuckian elected to statewide office in his own right. His polling lead helped him get the endorsement of Donald Trump — even though he is a protégé of Sen. Mitch McConnell, who tried to read Trump out of the party after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Cameron made much of the Trump endorsement, and rarely mentioned McConnell, explaining to NBC News that he had “to build a coalition that is large enough not only win the May 16 primary but also to beat Andy Beshear” — who had a higher popularity rating among Republicans than McConnell did in one pre-election poll.

So, McConnell didn’t publicly endorse Cameron, but I give the Senate majority leader and his political operatives partial credit for the win.

Cameron only raised $600,000 for his own campaign, so an essential element of his victory was the super PAC that spent $2.7 million attacking former ambassador Kelly Craft, who had been catching up to him by spending $11 million, a record for a primary.

The PAC got $2.2 million from a nonprofit tied to Leonard Leo, a conservative activist who helped McConnell and Trump remake the Supreme Court and recently broadened his work to other causes. For Cameron, “It helped stabilize his campaign,” McConnell adviser Scott Jennings said on KET election night.

Twice I have asked McConnell, through a spokesman, if he or anyone under his employ or direction raised money for the PAC. Twice the spokesman has not replied.

The financial maneuvers may remain officially mysterious, but it’s clear that Cameron earned the victory by following his mentor’s examples. Like McConnell at key points in his career, Cameron exercised calculated audacity.

First, he abandoned the career path McConnell apparently favored for him — re-election this year (something Cameron had publicly pledged to pursue), followed by a bid to succeed McConnell upon the senator’s anticipated retirement in 2026. With a young family, Cameron reportedly liked the prospect of working next door to the governor’s mansion rather than commuting to Washington, and he’s young enough (37) to be governor and then go to the Senate.

Also audaciously, Cameron sought the endorsement of McConnell’s enemy, Trump. That was not an abandonment of McConnell, but a taking of opportunity. McConnell understands that, and he’s also one of the few politicians who rarely takes anything personally. For him, it’s all about winning.

Like McConnell always does, Cameron ran a focused and disciplined campaign, with no reluctance to keep repeating himself to hammer home simple, key points — or to keep repeating non-answers to pointed questions, such as “Was the 2020 election fairly decided?” (We’ll keep asking, as long as Trump is for him.)

Trump’s legal troubles could make him a less effective endorser, but he carried Kentucky by 26 points in 2020, so he’s still a major asset for Cameron.

Cameron built his own asset value by getting almost 48% of the vote in a race with 12 candidates, six of whom qualified for debates, and piling up more than twice as many votes as the second-place finisher, Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles (who beat expectations and would be a logical running mate for lieutenant governor, a choice Cameron must make by early August).

?In Beshear, Cameron has an opponent who enjoys strong job-approval ratings, thanks largely to his initial handling of the pandemic, and to many voters seems like a nice guy who doesn’t deserve to lose his job. Look for Cameron to argue from hindsight that Beshear’s pandemic restrictions were too strong and too long, to keep waging the culture war with gender and school issues, and to remind voters that Beshear belongs to a party that is more liberal than they are.

The race is the nation’s most important this year, already drawing lots of national money and attention. The election-night headlines in The New York Times and The Washington Post had a national focus but different takes; the Times said “Ally of Mitch McConnell wins” and the Post called him “Trump-backed Daniel Cameron.”

With McConnell for him on the inside and Trump for him on the outside, Cameron is a formidable challenger for Beshear — who still seems to have the edge, but maybe not for long.

Addendum: ?The most heartening news, from a Republican electorate that apparently thinks by wide margin that Trump’s loss in 2020 was not legitimate, was Secretary of State Michael Adams’ easy win over two election deniers. May it stiffen the resolve of his Republican counterparts around the nation.

This column is republished ?from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, at the U.S. Capitol, speaking to reporters. (Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

Mitch McConnell is back in the saddle as leader of Republican senators, but his status as the leader of Kentucky Republicans seems in doubt as they head toward Tuesday’s primary election.

First, a Washington update: After a 40-day absence from a fall and a head injury, the 81-year McConnell (he’s exactly nine months older than Joe Biden) is reasserting himself in public statements.

He’s backing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s gambit to leverage the nation’s debt ceiling to win spending cuts, while trying to reassure the world that the government won’t stop paying what it owes — and saying Congress will keep funding the defense of Ukraine “for a good deal longer.”

And the Senate minority leader, who operates mainly behind the scenes, is playing some very public politics.

He told Bloomberg News that fired Fox News opinionator Tucker Carlson “had developed a coterie of followers in the Congress as well as in the country that I found disturbing.” (Note the past-tense wishful thinking.) Carlson has been perhaps the leading critic of U.S. support for Ukraine — billions that McConnell said would be “a bargain” if it can defeat Russia — and has tried to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

“At the risk of patting myself on the back, not many Republicans went after Tucker Carlson, but I did,” McConnell told Bloomberg, referring to his March 7 objection to Carlson’s grossly misleading presentation about the insurrection at the Capitol.

But we are sinking further into the age of post-truth politics, in which Carlson can announce he’s starting a new show on Twitter and say “The news you consume is a lie,” arguing implicitly that only he is to be believed. Sadly, millions are likely to swallow that hogwash.?

This age was started by Donald Trump, whom McConnell tried to read out of the Republican Party on Jan. 6 and afterward. That effort backfired, as McConnell’s poll numbers among Republicans sank and Trump’s remained high.

That, and Trump’s continued castigations of McConnell, explain why the man who built the modern GOP in Kentucky has become a punching bag for Republicans trying to win votes in Tuesday’s primary.

In the governor’s race, that strategy was limited to Eric Deters, a Trump-embracing firebrand from Northern Kentucky who has called Attorney General Daniel Cameron, Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles and former ambassador Kelly Craft “swamp puppets” of McConnell. Then Craft ran a TV ad that depicted Cameron and McConnell as “career politicians who’d rather follow than lead,” and scheduled Saturday rallies in Louisville and Richmond with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, McConnell’s arch-enemy. Her campaign has become a pure anti-McConnell play, despite the support she and her billionaire husband, coal operator Joe Craft, have given McConnell in the past.

Jumping on the bandwagon, auditor candidate Derek Pettys is running a radio ad against Treasurer Allison Ball, saying he’s not tied to McConnell or Frankfort lobbyists. And no candidate is touting ties to McConnell.

Cameron has Trump’s endorsement but is a McConnell protégé who seems to have the senator’s back-channel support. He rarely brings up McConnell’s name, and has often mentioned Trump’s backing. But in Tuesday night’s statewide debate, he mentioned neither man, perhaps thinking that voters who watch debates are less likely to be influenced by such an endorsement — and maybe that Trump’s radioactivity increased with Tuesday’s verdict by a New York jury that Trump should pay $5 million for sexual abuse of a woman who accused him of rape.?

The debate’s first question sought reaction to that afternoon’s verdict. Cameron bailed: “I don’t know the specifics of the complaint,” he said of the widely reported case. Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles did likewise: “We’re still finding out the details.” Deters said, “I believe the woman is lying.”

Craft, who has avoided most debates, didn’t attend — apparently hoping that the massive ad campaign financed by her husband’s wealth will make up for her shortage of qualifications. Despite that, in the KET debate she said “We are going to leave my husband out of it.” Sorry, but no. Maybe Joe should be on the ballot; he’s an executive.

McConnell has been the stoutest advocate of money in politics, which has become more important as local and state news coverage has shriveled and voters focus on national issues and personalities. That’s one reason visits by Cruz may have more impact now than they would have had eight years ago, when he was running for president (finishing second to Trump in the Kentucky caucuses). Messages are more controlled by candidates, and they’re more often misleading. Maybe that’s why as few as 10% of Republicans will vote, as predicted by Secretary of State Michael Adams – who says he could lose to an election denier because voters aren’t paying attention.

Tuesday may tell us what sort of Republican Party we have in Kentucky.

This column is republished ?from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell appear to be aligned in Kentucky's gubernatorial primary, if nowhere else. (Photo by Chet Strange/Getty Images)

Welcome, Derby visitors!

Kentucky’s annual turn on the national stage is our chance to look at the state’s politics with a national perspective. This year we’re electing a governor and other state constitutional officers, and messages in the May 16 Republican primary are dominated by the national themes of identity politics and the culture war; even agriculture-commissioner candidate ads decry ”woke liberals.”

We have national players, including Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, who despite their enmity appear to be aligned in the governor’s race; and Kentucky quirks, such as a billionaire coal operator spending record sums for a primary to get the governorship for his wife, who has never held elective office. Here’s the program for the political derby:

The favorite remains Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a McConnell protégé who apparently won Trump’s endorsement last summer with a poll showing him way ahead. That was before the entry of Kelly Craft, who became Trump’s ambassador to Canada and the United Nations after she and her husband, coal magnate Joe Craft, raised a lot of money for his political causes (and McConnell’s).

McConnell, who likes to stay out of in-state primaries, is publicly neutral. But someone’s been raising money for a PAC backing Cameron, and Craft seems to believe it’s the senator or his minions. One of her latest TV ads slams “insider politicians” who “follow rather than lead” as the screen shows side-by-side photos of McConnell and Cameron.

Throwing shade on Kentucky’s top Republican in a GOP primary night seem odd, but McConnell is the least popular senator in the nation, according to home-state polling, and in a primary with little difference on issues, tagging your main opponent with his unpopular but well-known mentor makes sense. Another Craft ad, about her work for Trump, seems designed to make it look as if he has endorsed her.

Only one member of Kentucky’s congressional delegation is publicly supporting a candidate: First District Rep. James Comer, who’s backing Craft in an apparent return favor for the Crafts’ support of his 2015 gubernatorial campaign, which lost the primary to Matt Bevin by 83 votes. If Craft defeats a McConnell acolyte, it could signal a seismic shift in Kentucky politics.

A Craft-Comer faction would be a mainly rural one, like Comer’s district. The state GOP has a history of rural-urban divides, and Cameron’s base is the Louisville region, where he needs a good turnout, which is in doubt. Some moderate Republicans there may dislike how he handled the grand-jury investigation of the police shooting of Breonna Taylor, but they may like the idea of their party producing the state’s first African American governor.

Race could be a factor. Cameron is the first African American independently elected to statewide office in Kentucky, a state that is only 8% Black and has many voters who still don’t know a person of color. The exit poll in the Obama-Clinton Democratic presidential primary in 2008 found that 16 percent of white voters said the race of the candidates was important to them, and in Kentucky at the time, rural white Democrats and Republicans differed little culturally. Since then, many culturally conservative Democrats have become Republicans, giving the party the edge in voter registration.

Despite that and other historic shifts to the right, Kentuckians ousted Bevin in 2019 because he ran his mouth too much and made too many enemies. The winner, by 0.4% of the vote, was Democrat Andy Beshear, whose work on the pandemic built popular support that seems to be lasting; he is the nation’s most popular Democratic governor, and fifth overall.

Beshear has nominal opposition in the primary, but the Republican Governors Association seems to be trying to gin up anti-Beshear vote from social conservatives who remain registered Democratic, with TV commercials alleging that he “seems to think young children are ready to make decisions about changing their gender,” one of many TV-ad falsehoods that are confusing voters. When Beshear vetoed a bill banning gender-affirming care of minors, he said those decisions should be left to parents. That stance was strongly favored in a statewide poll, but just because voters have an opinion doesn’t mean they will base their votes on it.

The Republican who wins the primary will keep trying to cast Beshear as a captive of his party’s woke wing, and if it’s Craft, she will likely get the endorsement of Trump, who remains strong in Kentucky. (He reiterated his endorsement of Cameron in a Twitter video just before the first Cameron-Craft debate faceoff Monday.) If Ag Commissioner Ryan Quarles wins, Trump may not play; Quarles said in an earlier debate that he favored Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump for president. Quarles is the most traditional Republican in the primary, but Trump has changed the party, especially in Kentucky. Just ask McConnell.

This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Laura Humphrey walks a wheelbarrow to a pile of debris while volunteering to clean up in Perry County near Hazard on Aug. 6, 2022. Thousands of Eastern Kentucky residents lost their homes ater devastating rain storms flooded the area. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

HAZARD — How does one of the nation’s poorest rural regions recover from the most disastrous flooding some of its communities have ever seen?

“Neighbors, heroes and leaders.”

That answer was the three-legged theme sounded repeatedly by Peter Hille, chair of the East Kentucky Leadership Foundation, at its annual conference in Hazard Thursday and Friday — exactly nine months after the flash floods left many in Southeastern Kentucky wondering about their region’s future.

The 35th annual East Kentucky Leadership Conference made clear that the disaster had created a greater sense of community among neighbors, some of whom responded by becoming heroes and leaders. Several were spotlighted in the annual East Kentucky Leadership Awards:

• Kate Clemons of Hazard, who didn’t know anyone in Knott County but organized free-food distribution there immediately after the flood and is still running a food center in Hindman;
• Whitesburg firefighter Charles “Red” Colwell, who can’t swim but rescued 14 people from deep, rushing floodwaters and is now chief of the department in the Letcher County seat;
• Nathan Day of Knott County, who rescued nine people and told Hazard’s WYMT, “I just feel like if everyone would open their doors and open their hearts, this world would be a better place.”
• Gwen Johnson of the Hemphill Community Center in Letcher County, a distribution site for supplies and place of refuge and healing space where people could gather to feel a sense of community;
• Donna Campbell and the Lost Creek Fire Department in Perry County, which rescued people and served as a distribution center for supplies, and is organizing rebuilding of homes;
• The Rousseau Volunteer Fire Department in Breathitt County, which rescued 15 people, including 12 in an attic, and has helped more than 4,000 families;
• Scott McReynolds and the Housing Development Alliance, which helped preserve 41 homes, repaired 31 and placed six families in new homes, and has applicaitons for 120 more.
• Gerry Roll and the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, which has raised more than $7.4 million for flood relief and has written more than 8,000 checks.

For each plaque handed out Thursday night, 10 to 20 more people or organizations deserve the same recognition, McReynolds told the crowd at Hazard Community and Technical College.

Roll, CEO of the foundation, said in accepting its award, “We’re here for you. We are you, you are us. That’s what community is.”

The foundation and other philanthropies made major differences in the recovery, said Lynn Knight, an economic development consultant in Washington and New Orleans who has done much post-disaster work and attended the conference.

Knight also told the Institute for Rural Journalism that the region is fortunate to have several community development finance institutions, such as Hille’s Mountain Associationand the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., which can play a role in financing the recovery. The combination of CDFIs and philanthropy make the region unique, she said.

The disaster has helped some local governments and officials overcome political and geographic rivalries that have often impeded progress in the region.

“The biggest success we’ve had is tearing down the walls” between local governments, said Perry County Judge-Executive Scott Alexander, quoting Hazard Mayor Donald “Happy” Mobelini as saying that “If something’s good for the city, it’s good for the county, and if something’s good for the county, it’s good for the city.”

Alexander said Friday morning that should also apply to competition between counties for jobs. “There’s nothing wrong with somebody living in Perry County and working in Knott County,” he said. “So let’s look at Appalachia as a whole. Let’s tear those barriers down.”

Much of the conference was devoted to the experiences, opinions and hopes of high-school students in the region, which will be the topic of future reports from the Institute for Rural Journalism.

The reporting is being done by Ivy Brashear in her role as the Institute’s first David Hawpe Fellow in Appalachian Reporting, named for the late Louisville Courier Journal editor who was born in Pike County and was the newspaper’s East Kentucky Bureau chief in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The fellowship is for students at the University of Kentucky, Hawpe’s alma mater. Brashear, a native of Perry County, is a Ph.D. student in the UK College of Communication and Information. If you have story ideas for her, you may email her here.

This story is republished from The Rural Blog, published by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky.

Gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft speaks during the Warren County Republicans' Lincoln Day Dinner on April 14 at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

This article is published with permission of the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Ever since the Republican primary for governor shaped up, the big question has been: Can personal wealth buy a GOP nomination for the state’s highest office? Now we ask, can money and misinformation win the May 16 election?

Perhaps. The fabulously funded, falsehood-flaunting campaign of former ambassador Kelly Craft is catching up to Attorney General Daniel Cameron, as evidenced by his paid-TV attacks on her after he spent months as the clear leader in polls — perhaps creating an opening for Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles.

It would be nice (and accurate) to say that Craft is in striking distance because she is the hardest-working candidate and a charmer on the campaign trail. But it’s mainly about money — and perhaps about misinformation. This could be the first primary for governor in which the nomination is not decided by votes based on facts, but on false and misleading media messages.

The main example is Craft’s ad that shows “woke bureaucrats parachuting in” to a “Kentucky public school” and “forcing woke ideology into the classroom,” the object example being critical race theory, which is not taught in the state’s public schools. A pre-teen girl seems forced to say which pronouns she prefers, and Craft appears, saying, “It’s immoral … I’ll dismantle the Department of Education.” But only the legislature can do that.

The ad’s basis is the department’s advice — not a requirement — that school districts honor students’ requests to be addressed by a certain name or pronoun. But now the department can’t “recommend policies or procedures for the use of pronouns that do not conform” to the sex listed on the student’s original birth certificate, under a law sponsored by Craft’s running mate for lieutenant governor, Sen. Max Wise of Campbellsville.

Some may dismiss the ad as a joke, but a matter for serious discussion should not be the topic of a cartoonish ad that uses bizarre bureaucrats to stoke voters’ fears of people with different lifestyles. It’s hateful and shameful. But Craft’s campaign is a shameless one, using Christian imagery in mailers that make it seem like she’s running for Sunday-school superintendent, not governor. What does evangelist Franklin Graham know about who should be our governor?

The Craft mailer with Graham’s endorsement says “This campaign is one built on faith.” Candidates who wrap themselves in religion violate the spirit of Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, which says “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Cameron has no shortage of religion in his ads, as he attacks Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear for closing churches at the start of the pandemic and says we need a governor who knows that “only faith can keep us strong.” Faith can be a great help in secular matters, but it’s not the sole source of strength.

For political strength, Republicans are counting on religion and social issues. A new ad from a group tied to the Republican Governors Association says “Beshear seems to think that young children are ready to make decisions about changing their gender.” Actually, in vetoing the bill that bans gender-affirming care for minors, Beshear cited the need to protect parents’ rights. (Beshear faces little more than token Democratic opposition, but the ad seems to be an effort to embarrass him by generating primary turnout from ardent social conservatives who remain registered Democratic.)

Misinformation has always been part of political campaigns, but until recent years there were significant disincentives. News media would make much of misleading ads, and confront candidates who ran them. Today, candidates avoid debates (Craft is the main absentee, but Cameron missed the KSR debate Wednesday) and play hide-and-seek with a depleted cadre of reporters, especially those working for newspapers — which, despite the demise of their old business model, remain the primary fact-finders in our society.

Many fewer people read the facts these days. Forty years ago, the state’s two largest papers — The Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader, which then covered every major gubernatorial campaign daily in the last few weeks — had a combined circulation of more than 300,000. In 2003, it was around 180,000; last year, it was just over 70,000, including digital subscriptions, which were only recently added to newspapers’ postal reports.

In the place of journalism, which practices a discipline of verification, Kentuckians get their political information from social media, which have hardly any discipline or verification – or from television, which is largely superficial. In the 2008 U.S. Senate race, advertising time on Lexington TV stations was 30 times that devoted to news stories about the race, few of which had any details useful to voters trying to make a choice. TV has changed little, and newspapers have changed a lot, so this column largely spits into the wind. So I guess I should say: Share this on social!

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican in the anti-Trump lane, will bring his presidential campaign to Bowling Green April 14. (John Sykes/Arkansas Advocate)

This article is published with permission of the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Kentucky’s political system, largely run by Republicans these days, has thankfully avoided copying other red states’ mischief with their election systems, spawned largely by Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was taken from him by fraud. The legislature made voting a little easier in four ways, a little harder in three, and in the session just ended did no damage.

But the leading Republicans who want to replace Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear at the top of the state’s political pecking order quickly fell in line for the Trump parade when it was revealed that a Manhattan grand jury had indicted the former president on charges of falsifying business records — even though they didn’t know the specifics of the charges.

Their self-serving political reactions made clear that Trump still polls well among Kentucky Republicans who vote in primary elections — specifically, those who are expected to vote on May 16.

The most objectionable candidate was Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who seems to forget that he is the state’s top law-enforcement officer when he hears the name of the scofflaw who has endorsed his candidacy.

“I’m appalled by the political weaponization of our justice system against President Trump,” Cameron said in a statement while the indictment was still sealed. He accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of “a politically motivated prosecution because it appeases the desires of the far left.” A poll a few days later found that 60 percent of Americans approved of the indictment; interestingly, 62 percent of independents did. They hadn’t read it, either, but the poll showed that the desire to hold Trump accountable for misdeeds isn’t a “far left” proposition.

Trump’s legal troubles seem to have firmed up his base, and Cameron seems to think it will do likewise for him. Soon after the indictment was announced, Cameron doubled down and started running a TV commercial highlighting Trump’s endorsement of him.

Kelly Craft, whom Trump named ambassador to Canada and then to the United Nations, sounded themes similar to Cameron’s: “Leftists will stop at nothing, including political prosecution.” (Craft’s campaign and/or super PAC recently spent huge sums attacking Cameron in TV ads, falsely blaming him for closure of a West Virginia coal-fired power plant in a utility grid that serves Kentucky.)

Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles (who has yet to start TV ads) repeated Cameron and Craft’s assertions that Bragg is shortchanging violent-crime prosecutions, but went a step further — asserting that “He spent his time openly campaigning for office with a plan to put President Trump behind bars.” I asked the Quarles campaign for evidence of that, but all it produced was a story showing that in running? for DA, Bragg cited his investigations of Trump for New York’s attorney general — far short of what Quarles tweeted.

It remains to be seen just how strong or weak Alvin Bragg and his case are, but Trump has bigger problems.

He is under threat of indictment on state election-interference charges in Georgia, federal charges in Florida over refusal to return classified documents, and in Washington, D.C., for the violent insurrection he sponsored to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.

Stop. Go back. Read that paragraph again. No one would have imagined it eight years ago. This is the most popular figure in one of the two major parties in the world’s most important democratic republic.

Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that Trump is not a normal political or historical figure. He took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” then tried to thwart it on Jan. 6, 2021; and almost two years later called for “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” so there could be a new election.

Donald Trump is more than an egotistical autocrat. He’s an unhinged quasi-fascist who is a threat to our democracy, and the sooner Republicans realize that — and act on that realization — the better off our nation will be.

Kentucky Republicans, at least those not seeking votes right now, have a chance to start returning to normal Friday, April 14 in Bowling Green. That’s when Asa Hutchinson, who recently completed two honorable terms as governor of Arkansas and carries no brief for Trump, will speak to a Warren County Republican Party dinner. He said last weekend that he’s running for president, that Trump should step aside so he can deal with his legal problems, and “I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts.”

Right now Hutchinson is the only GOP candidate in the anti-Trump lane, so he deserves a salute. It will be interesting to see how he plays in Bowling Green. For the sake of democracy, we should wish him an encouraging visit.

That’s what the Senate has come to: Veteran legislators, such as Sen. Jared Carpenter, R-Berea, aren’t comfortable with what should be common legislative process. (Photo by LRC Public Information)

For a few minutes on the ides of March, it seemed the legislature was really legislating.

Faced with a transgender-youth bill that ignored medical advice, the state Senate did a rare thing in this era of tight partisan control: It voted on a substantive floor amendment, and wonder of wonders, narrowly passed it.

The amendment to House Bill 470 from Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, made “a bad bill better,” said Sen. Reggie Thomas, D-Lexington. Under the amendment, minors could get some nonsurgical medical treatments with parental consent, and transgender youth could change their names on birth certificates, contrary to the original bill.

The amendment passed 19-17, with all seven Democrats joining 12 of the 30 Republicans to make a majority. Most GOP leaders were on the losing side — also highly unusual.

When faced with issues that could split their party caucuses, leaders often maneuver to block floor amendments, limiting debate and tough votes that could be used against legislators in the next election. They couldn’t do that in this case, because the bill had cleared a committee on the votes of Carroll and Republicans Whitney Westerfield and Julie Raque Adams, who made clear that it would have to be changed on the floor. (Adams, the GOP caucus chair, passed on the floor amendment.)

So the bill was changed on the floor. But there are many ways to pass legislation, and more ways to kill it. Bear with me:

Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer then turned to Sen. Gex Williams, R-Verona, who moved to table the bill, which would have required 19 votes (the 38-member Senate has one vacancy) to revive it. President Robert Stivers started to order a roll call, then asked Williams if he wanted to lay it on the clerk’s desk (which would require only a simple majority vote to revive it). After conferring with staffers who came to his seat, Williams changed his motion.

The bill was laid on the desk by a different vote of 19-17, as some Republicans switched sides. Those who voted for the amendment, but then to lay the bill aside, were Sens. David Givens of Greensburg, the president pro tem, perhaps following the lead of other GOP leaders (Adams passed again); and Jared Carpenter of Berea and Matt Deneen of Elizabethtown. Sen. Jimmy Higdon of Lebanon went the other way, voting against Carroll’s amendment but then against laying the bill aside.

Interviewed six days later, Higdon said he was “maxed out” that night and couldn’t recall why he switched. Carpenter, in his 13th year in the Senate, said it was the first time he had seen such a process and outcome, and “Once we got to that level, we didn’t need to go ahead and pass it … I felt something was not right and I didn’t have a comfort level with it.”

That’s what the Senate has come to: Veteran legislators aren’t comfortable with what should be common legislative process. It’s the kind of thing that happens when a majority party has what Higdon called “a hard, fast rule” that no bill will come to the floor unless it has a majority of that majority (example currently pending: sports betting), and most of the real debate on controversial bills is in private — especially in the daily, secret caucus of Republican senators. They’re not fully accustomed to public give and take.

The day after the Senate dealt with HB 470, the House added most of its original contents to Senate Bill 150, passed it, and the Senate concurred in the changes 30-7, sending Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear another culture-war bill to veto.

The point man on that end-around was Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, running mate of gubernatorial candidate Kelly Craft. His leadership on the bill should help them as they try to overtake Attorney General Daniel Cameron for the May 16 nomination to face Beshear, but an advantage in the primary may be a disadvantage in the general election. Beshear has criticized the bill as an invasion of parents’ rights, and has labeled other Republican culture-war measures as extreme.

Republicans tagged Beshear with that label for policing a few scofflaw churches in the pandemic, but went to their own extremes with him, quashing his expansion of Medicaid dental and vision benefits with money the program saves by having one pharmacy-benefits manager. His administration says more than 8,000 newly eligible people, in all 120 counties, have already benefited. That ends July 1.

Republicans groused about then-Gov. Steve Beshear’s expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare but never really did anything about it, fearing blame for hurting needy Kentuckians. Now, eager to oust his son, they are allowing Andy Beshear to cast himself in the role of moderate caregiver that he cultivated in the pandemic, building public support. Vengeance and culture wars are risky.

This article is published with permission of the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Protesters rallied in the Kentucky Capitol against anti-trans legislation, March 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by McKenna Horsley)

When the Kentucky House voted to ban gender-affirming medical treatment for Kentucky minors, even if their parents want them to have such care, it illustrated what’s wrong with our politics and with the Kentucky General Assembly.

Medical science and wisdom are ignored, and the legislative process is abused, all for political expediency. The loudest and most extreme voices hold sway, and compromise is rare, because a poor, under-educated state that once voted its pocketbook is now voting its traditional culture — perhaps to the long-term detriment of its economy.

Political beliefs aside, the process has clearly gone bad. The House passed House Bill 470 mere hours after a revised version was approved in committee, giving no time for drafting of amendments that would have allowed meaningful deliberation of a complex question.

That’s because the legislative leaders who run the show on the third floor of the Capitol want to avoid votes on amendments, in order to keep members’ votes from being used against them in elections – and to keep their Republican majority caucuses from fracturing, which Sen. Mitch McConnell warned Republicans about when they took control of the state Senate 23 years ago. It’s basic legislative politics, but it’s poor government.

The 75-22 vote that sent?HB 470?to the Senate was almost completely along partisan lines, with only three Republicans voting no. Tellingly, one was the chair of the House’s health committee, Rep. Kimberly Poore Moser of Taylor Mill in Northern Kentucky.

Kim Moser is a nurse by profession — and a politician by performance and by heritage. In her fourth two-year term, she’s the daughter of the late Dr. Floyd Poore, who was state transportation secretary and ran for governor and Congress as a Democrat.

The bill was a logical one for her Health Services Committee, but it didn’t go there, apparently because House leaders knew how she felt about it. If they had sent it there, she might have crafted a compromise or at least made the bill less extreme.

After the floor vote, “She suggested that the bill be simplified to say that children under the age of 18 could not have transgender surgery, and to limit hormone therapy to those who have had extensive counseling,”?reported?Melissa Patrick of Kentucky Health News (which I publish).

Instead, if the bill becomes law, medical practitioners will be wary if not scared of offering advice and counsel to youth who need it, and may leave the state, Moser told her colleagues:

“Eighty percent of what family practitioners and many other physicians do in their practice is address mental health. It’s not only counselors who address mental health of their patients. Patients come in with a wide variety of situations, and their physicians need to be those trusted individuals with whom they can have a confidential conversation. . . . I think this goes too far. I think it’s discriminatory. I think it eliminates parents’ rights.”

But our tribalized politics make compromise difficult, especially with issues that go to voters’ cultural beliefs, which in Kentucky center on religion. A series of culture-war issues in the last 60 years has turned Kentuckians away from the increasingly liberal Democratic Party and made the GOP more conservative: school prayer, civil rights, abortion, gay rights, and now an issue few people even knew about until recently: transgender rights.

It’s a subject that may seem bizarre to many Kentuckians; it isn’t so strange if you’ve met a transgender or nonbinary person, or read up on the subject. But these days most reading takes place on social media, and is too often about confirming what you already believe rather than opening yourself to contrary views. You want confirmation more than information.

So, that’s what your politicians give you, as ignorance leads to fear and then to hate. We need more politicians like Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican who said when he vetoed a bill banning transgender girls from sports, “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.”

Utah state Sen. Daniel Thatcher, another Republican who opposes such bills, told The New York Times that voters are “being told this is a social contagion, these kids are popping up because we’ve made it popular. Bull—. It’s becoming more common because it is becoming safer. It is not safe. But it’s safer. As it becomes safer for people to come out, more and more people are going to realize ‘This is someone I care about. This is a family member. This is a friend. This is a friend’s kid.’”

Thatcher said his party’s politics remind him of 3-year-olds playing soccer: “They don’t know where the lines are, they don’t know where the goals are. . . . They just want to kick the ball as hard as they can. That’s politics today.”

This article is published with permission of the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivers remarks ahead of President Joe Biden in Covington Wednesday. (Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Michael Clubb)

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has become one of the most outspoken advocates of stronger support for Ukraine, even as his party displays a deeper split on the issue.

McConnell made his position clear last Friday at the Munich Security Conference, repeatedly calling for accelerating and expanding military aid to Ukraine.

“I think we ought to be giving them what they need to win the war as soon as possible,” he told a questioner who said NATO’s incremental approach to military support was “setting ourselves up for a forever war, giving them just enough to survive but not to win.” McConnell replied, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

He said the U.S. and its allies have been “all too tentative” in making decisions, “out of some vague notion that we’re going to provoke Vladimir Putin. Ladies and gentlemen, he’s provoked, right? He’s provoked. And none of these efforts … where we’ve sort of pulled our punches in the hope that he would somehow change direction have had any impact at all.”

McConnell also said, “How many times has he threatened to do things since the war began? You can’t make the Ukrainian strategy or the NATO strategy dependent on what Putin claims he might do; then he’s determining how the war is conducted. …?All these hypotheticals are interesting discussions, but those of us who are actually voting on these matters, I think we need to focus like a laser on what’s needed right now. That is getting the Ukrainians the weapons they need, as rapidly as they can, because winning is the answer to this. Winning is the answer.”

That last line reflects the essence of McConnell’s highly successful career, a cold-eyed focus on winning. In his Kentucky elections, he has been able to do that by making his opponents the main issue, but he is nationally unpopular, and that will undermine his stated goal of persuading Americans that they should be the “arsenal of democracy,” as he said in a speech at the conference. (He said the billions in U.S. support so far is only 0.02% of our gross domestic product.)

Before McConnell left for Munich, he told Fox News, “I am going to try to help explain to the American people that defeating the Russians in Ukraine is the single most important event going on in the world right now.”

He may also be trying to persuade some in Biden’s administration. An unnamed “senior U.S. official” told The Washington Post that Ukraine must be reminded that “We can’t do anything and everything forever.”

Asked about that during a panel discussion at the conference, McConnell had a blunt reply, “That’s obviously a person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” which drew a chuckle from French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna. “The people who are actually elected to office and who actually make the decisions about how long America is committed to this think Russia has to lose in Ukraine, and we can’t put a time limit on it,” a key point of the panel moderator’s questioning.

“We’re in this to win, because losing is not an option,” McConnell said. “Imagine how much it would cost all of us, all of us, if Russia won. And what about the implications in the Far East? When the prime minister of Japan says the single most important thing you can do to send a message to President Xi (Jinping of China) is to beat Putin in Ukraine, you know this has worldwide implications. So we need to change our thinking. …?Peace through strength is the only way to deal, not only with the present, but with the future.” That won applause from the crowd.

McConnell said he was speaking for most Republicans, but he meant members of Congress. An NBC News poll last month found that Republican voters opposed “more funding and weapons to Ukraine” by 2 to 1. McConnell told the Post that Republican opponents in Congress are getting too much attention, but the issue is getting more attention as the race for the Republican presidential nomination ramps up.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told Fox on Monday that Biden et al. “have effectively a blank-check policy with no clear, strategic objective identified, and these things can escalate, and I don’t think it’s in our interests to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea,” the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.

As some of his fellow Republicans make political hay of a world crisis, it’s good to see McConnell draw a firm line. We’re in a new Cold War, escalated by a hot one. The world is a more dangerous place, and Americans need to think long and hard about it.

This article is published with permission of the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

The Beshears greet attendees in the House chamber during the State of the Commonwealth address in Frankfort on Jan. 4. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Arden Barnes)

FRANKFORT. – The General Assembly is back in the state capital, and we can safely assume the governor’s?not happy about it.

Andy Beshear is a Democrat running for a second term, and the legislature is run by Republicans who want a?fellow partisan to replace him. It’s the first time a Kentucky legislature controlled by one party has faced a governor of?the other party who is seeking re-election.

He doesn’t like them, they don’t like him, and they’re in a position to cause him trouble.

They can pass legislation that he would be embarrassed to sign or pay a political price to veto. They can spotlight?the foibles of his administration, and they can echo and amplify themes of Republicans running to oust him.

Monday, former ambassador Kelly Craft said the state school board and education department “are a mess ―pushing woke agendas in our schools.”

Tuesday, Republican legislators said that’s what the department was doing, and was also driving away teachers,?by suggesting students be referred to by their preferred name or pronoun.
Those two events may have been a coincidence, but it’s clear that Republicans think one way to erode Beshear’s?remarkably high poll ratings is with hot-button social and cultural issues.

Last year, the legislature passed a law, over Beshear’s veto, that banned transgender students from competing?in women’s sports — an issue that had never arisen in Kentucky schools, and one on which the Kentucky High School?Athletic Association had a policy. You can envision the misleading attack ad: “Andy Beshear thinks boys posing as girls
should be able to compete in sports against your daughters.” Expect more fear-mongering bills.

Another attack ad could say “Andy Beshear refused to lower your taxes” because he vetoed last year’s bill to cut?the state income tax, citing the bill’s expansion of the sales tax to certain services. Republicans overrode the veto, and?now they have passed the next increment in the income-tax reduction.

The income-tax law seems written with Beshear in mind. It sets up a supposedly automatic process for reducing?the tax rate, based on available funds, but also says the cut can’t take effect without legislative action — so the governor?will have to decide whether to sign it, veto it or let it become law without his signature.

Beshear will also have to keep answering questions about slow delivery of tornado-relief benefits, mis-cut?disaster-relief checks (2% of the total, about the Major League Baseball error rate), his administration’s failure to head?off big trouble in the Department of Juvenile Justice, and revisionist recriminations about the pandemic prevention?measures on which his resilient popularity seems to be built.

Beshear is not without the ability to use the General Assembly for his own purposes. His main proposals for this?short session, and apparently his re-election campaign, are a big raise for teachers (stated reason: a teacher shortage,?exaggerated but real) and funding universal pre-kindergarten programs.

The legislature is not about to raise the pay of teachers, who are the biggest organized element of Beshear’s?political base, and some Republicans see pre-K as invasive social engineering rather than a way of addressing poor?children’s educational disadvantages and working families’ need for child care.

Beshear can use those positions against Republicans, and not just to win re-election. If he gets a second term, he?could use his proposals and popularity to recruit candidates against incumbent legislators in the 2024 and 2026?elections. That’s what the leader to a political party is supposed to do, but Beshear is a blue governor in a red state and?has demurred to conserve his political capital.

The governor has turned one neat political trick on the legislature. When the Senate again refused last year to?hear a House-passed bill to legalize medical marijuana, Beshear made a show of gathering public opinion on the issue?(we already knew it was overwhelmingly in favor) and issued an executive order with a novel use of his pardon power prospectively pardoning anyone who had eight ounces or less of cannabis purchased legally in another state and a doctor’s
statement they suffer from one of 21 conditions that cannabis may relieve.

That legal legerdemain left some Republicans sputtering, then arguing over whether the next medical-marijuana?bill should start in the House or in the Senate, which seems more logical because that’s where it has failed in the past. If legislators pass something, Beshear can take credit for getting them off dead center. If they pass nothing, he can still say?he exercised leadership in the vacuum they left.

Leadership is what voters look for in governors, and in candidates for governor. Beshear’s leadership in the?pandemic has given him a lead in the contest, but in Frankfort’s winter baseball game he will likely face some curveballs?and brushbacks.

This column is republished from the?Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

Kelly Craft's campaign ad shows tables with an empty chair. After this scene, she says, “As a mother, this is personal to me, because I have experienced that empty chair at my table. This has to stop.”

This column is reprinted from the Northern Kentucky Tribune,?a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

FRANKFORT – Elections should be about issues, not just candidates. So, Republican Kelly Craft is to be commended for making the first substantive commercial in the governor’s race about one of Kentucky’s most difficult issues: drug abuse that led to 2,250 overdose deaths in 2021.

We need to talk more about the issue, because it still swims in stigma that makes it difficult for individuals, communities and the state to deal with. When Craft alluded in the commercial to a family member’s drug problem, that surely made it easier for some members of her audience to talk about.

But the ad also allowed viewers to make false assumptions about Craft’s family history, and her reluctance to give more details may have added to the stigma. And now she has a follow-up ad that connects illegal immigration with smuggling of the powerful opioid fentanyl. It’s way off base.

First things first. Here’s what Craft said in the first ad, as the video showed empty chairs at family dinner tables:

“All across Kentucky, an empty chair. A place missing at the table. Families suffering because fentanyl and other dangerous drugs have stolen our loved ones away. As a mother, this is personal to me, because I have experienced that empty chair at my table.”

Craft’s clear implication was that a drug problem had kept one of her children from taking family meals. But for how long? Forever? No, “That person has not passed away,” she said in response to a question from Lexington’s WLEX-TV. Earlier, when Louisville’s WLKY-TV asked who the person was, she declined to say, but said “I have experienced a family member that has had an addiction.”

Following up with a news story for Kentucky Health News, which I publish, I told Craft’s campaign that I wasn’t interested in the family member’s name, just the relationship and the circumstances, to get a better understanding of how close she was to the issue.

The campaign issued a statement calling the person “a close family member” who lived in Craft’s household, “battled addiction and went to rehab. By the grace of God, that family member was able to overcome the addiction and move on with their life, but we all know the struggle never ends for a family and remains ongoing.”

The statement concluded, ” It’s insensitive and malicious to think an empty chair implies only death, and shows that those implying such don’t understand the pain caused by the drug epidemic.”

Insensitive? Malicious? Hardly.

University of Kentucky political-science professor Stephen Voss told WLEX, “I think most people seeing the ad likely inferred that she’s saying that a family member died, but that’s really sort of on the audience. It doesn’t say that. She says there’s an absent family member. She doesn’t say why they’re absent. The important thing for the electorate is, she’s claiming a special understanding of the policy issue.”

But if a misunderstanding is “sort of on the audience,” it’s also on Craft; everything in an ad is purposeful. She could have been clearer by saying, “As a mother, I have seen that empty chair while a loved one was stolen away by drugs.”

Journalists were right to question Craft about the ad, Voss said: “Once a candidate brings a family member into the debate and tries to use them to try to establish some kind of expertise or some kind of competence or understanding of an issue, then it’s hard for election watchers not to demand, ‘Who is this family member? What are you actually saying you experienced with them?'”

Craft’s latest ad takes advantage of her audience’s limited knowledge of subjects that are easy to demagogue.

“Joe Biden and Andy Beshear are ignoring the border crisis,” she says. “Criminals and illegal drugs like fentanyl are flooding into our state, ravaging our communities.”

Yes, Beshear failed to mention the drug problem in his State of the Commonwealth speech this month, but Craft is misleading voters by blaming illegal imports of fentanyl on illegal immigration.

“The vast majority of the fentanyl is not brought into the country by immigrants crossing the border in between ports of entry, but by drug traffic organizations smuggling it through legal checkpoints,” the nonpartisan Politifact said in deconstructing some Republican ads last fall.

Craft goes on to say that one of her “top priorities as governor will be to secure our state’s borders.” That looks silly in print, but probably sounds and looks good to voters who are wary of people who don’t look like them – especially as she ends the ad by saying, “If you’re a drug dealer, I’m coming for you.”

That’s a good priority for our governor, but it doesn’t mean the ad isn’t base demagoguery. Voters want and need leadership on tough issues; instead, they are being misled.

Kelly Craft's campaign ad shows tables with an empty chair. After this scene, she says, “As a mother, this is personal to me, because I have experienced that empty chair at my table. This has to stop.”

This article is republished from?Kentucky Health News, an independent news service of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, with support from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

“All across Kentucky, an empty chair. A place missing at the table. Families suffering because fentanyl and other dangerous drugs have stolen our loved ones away. As a mother, this is personal to me, because I have experienced that empty chair at my table. This has to stop. We need leadership. And as your governor, I’ll back up our police and stop drugs at our border. So there’s no spot missing at the family table.”

The 30-second television commercial has left some viewers wondering who formerly occupied that empty chair, when, and what happened to them.

In an interview with Mark Vanderhoff of Louisville’s WLKY?last week, Craft declined to identify the person and said the ad refers to “a family member that has had an addiction.” Then, in an impromptu interview, Craft told?Ricky Sayer of Lexington’s WLEX that the family member is living.

In a statement Sunday to Kentucky Health News, Craft’s campaign identified the person as “a close family member” who lived in her household, “battled addiction and went to rehab. By the grace of God, that family member was able to overcome the addiction and move on with their life, but we all know the struggle never ends for a family and remains ongoing.”

The statement added,?“An empty chair represents a long road of pain, whether caused by the passing of a loved one or years away from the table. It’s insensitive and malicious to think an empty chair implies only death, and shows that those implying such don’t understand the pain caused by the drug epidemic.”

That last line could be taken as a reply to Nick Storm of Kentucky Fried Politics, an online newsletter that said Craft’s explanation that the family member is still living showed that the ad “is hyperbole,” which Webster’s Dictionary defines as “extravagant exaggeration.” The Oxford Languages Dictionary, which Google uses, calls it?“exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.” The ad makes no specific claim.

Craft, a former ambassador to Canada and the United Nations, told WLKY, “It was very painful at first to be able to open myself up. It’s very emotional. But after traveling throughout the state of Kentucky, my pain is minuscule compared to what I’m hearing and that’s because we have a crisis in this state.”

In 2021, Kentucky documented a record 2,250 drug-overdose deaths, 15 percent more than 2020, which had 54% more than 2019.?Toxicology reports showed that fentanyl was involved in 73%, or 1,639. That was 16% more than the 1,413 overdose deaths involving fentanyl in 2020.

“Ambassador Craft is really putting her finger on one of the most important issues in Kentucky,” Kentucky Public Radio Frankfort reporter Ryland Barton told “Kentucky Edition” host Renee Shaw on?Jan. 18.?“There was some question there, you know, who exactly was she talking about, you know, how close actually is she to this issue?”

That was the central question asked by Kentucky Health News. The written reply from Craft’s campaign began, “As a mother, Kelly knows that the pain caused by the drug epidemic affects almost every family in Kentucky. Kelly has dealt with the chaos addiction causes, first hand. She knows what it means to miss a close family member at the dinner table. Kelly knows the pain that is felt as a family member misses holidays, family dinners, church, school, work, and family events as they confront an addiction ravaging their life.”

In interviews, Craft has criticized Gov. Andy Beshear for not mentioning the drug problem in his State of the Commonwealth speech to the legislature on Jan. 5. Her latest ad says Beshear and President Biden are “ignoring the border crisis,” which she connects with the importation of fentanyl.

Beshear began his weekly press conference Thursday, Jan. 19, by inviting Kentucky communities to apply for “Recovery Ready” certification, which measures their prevention, treatment and recovery support to residents seeking help for drug or alcohol addiction.

Thursday night in London, Craft called drugs the No. 1 issue in Kentucky and possibly in the U.S. That was the first clip from her in Sayer’s three-and-a-half minute report?on WLEX, which began by saying that Craft was “choosing to keep private part of a story she made public.”

After that clip, WLEX aired Craft’s defense: “The ad was very clear. As a mother, as a family member, I have felt that pain. Luckily, we were able to continue to have that seat at our table.”

Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers wants recommendations on possibly restructuring higher education. (Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Arden Barnes)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell extends a hand to President Joe Biden in Covington at a celebration of funding for the Brent Spence Bridge project, Jan. 4, 2023. (Photo for Kentucky Lantern by Michael Clubb)

This column is republished from the?Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

The contrast was stark in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.

The east side was chaos, as the new, thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives failed to elect a speaker, the prerequisite for doing any other business.

The west side was calm and comity, as Democrats kept nominal control of the Senate and its powerful Republican minority was still led by Mitch McConnell, who started his 17th year as party leader.

That’s a record, and McConnell marked it with a speech largely devoted to the career of Montana Democrat Mike Mansfield, who held the record until Tuesday. (Mansfield still holds the 16-year record, 1961 through 1976, for tenure as majority leader, a job that only became official about 100 years ago.)

McConnell, 80, has now achieved his main stated ambitions as a senator: to be majority leader, which he was in 2015-21 and might be again in 2025-26; and to be the longest-serving party leader.

Halfway through his first two-year term as majority leader, it seemed that those distinctions would be McConnell’s main epitaph, because long tenure was his chief accomplishment as a senator. And then Antonin Scalia died.

By blocking action on Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia on the Supreme Court, McConnell preserved its conservative majority and created an issue useful to Republicans, especially Donald Trump, who used promises about judicial nominations to win favor of evangelicals who were skeptical of him – and without whom he probably would not have been elected.

After Trump and senators filled Scalia’s seat with Neil Gorsuch, the next high-court nominee was Brett Kavanaugh, who hit the skids because of allegations about youthful misconduct. McConnell hung tough and won, with one vote to spare. Then he pushed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination eight days before the presidential election on a purely partisan vote, the first for a justice in 150 years.

At that point, it looked as if McConnell’s main legacy would be decades of Supreme Court conservatism. And then Donald Trump lost the election. And refused to concede.

Once the Electoral College voted, McConnell declared Trump the loser, and later blamed him for the Jan. 6 riot, but voted not to convict him in the impeachment trial. He cited a technicality (Trump was out of office) but it became clear that he had been unwilling or unable to persuade 16 other Republicans to create the two-thirds majority needed to convict. And they didn’t want to risk Trump creating a new political party.

McConnell’s new mission, in likely his last term, seems to be saving the Republican Party from Trump.

He has avoided mentioning Trump’s name for more than two years, knowing the former president’s grip on most Republican voters, while waiting for shoes to drop in the riot investigations. As they have, he has gradually put his foot on the anti-Trump accelerator.

Before the election, McConnell suggested that Republicans might not regain the Senate majority due to “candidate quality,” a reference to subpar candidates nominated with Trump’s help. When his implied prediction came true, he said, “I think the former president’s political clout has diminished. . . . We lost support that we needed among independents and moderate Republicans, primarily related to the view they had of us as a party — largely made by the former president — that we were sort of nasty and tended toward chaos.”

That view was surely reinforced by Tuesday’s chaos in the House, which is no longer just fearful of Trump and his base, but more reflective of it, with new, election-denying MAGA members.

McConnell, who can be calm to a fault, is running against chaos and its chief avatar, Trump. He knows elections are still decided by voters who want Congress to do things to help the country, and that’s one reason he supported bills that passed the Senate with a minority of Republicans, such as the infrastructure bill that he celebrated with President Biden and Gov. Andy Beshear at the Brent Spence Bridge on Wednesday.

McConnell has also been quick to strike at Trump slips, such as the dinner with the widely known anti-Semite and the call for “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” to justify his lies about the 2020 election.

Trump remains a stout adversary. He could still be the party’s 2024 nominee, and he recently raised the third-party option, sharing an article promoting the idea. He has changed the GOP, and now could destroy it. McConnell’s final ambition may be to prevent that.

One of McConnell’s favorite compliments is to call someone “consequential,” which is a way of acknowledging accomplishments without approving them. Whatever your opinion of him, there is no doubt he is one of the most consequential politicians in American history. And he may yet be more so.

(Getty Images)

This article is republished from?Kentucky Health News, ?an independent news service of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, with support from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

Kentuckians’ sense of well-being from 2008 to 2017 was the worst of any U.S. state?except West Virginia, according to a research paper that uses polling data to compare life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested along with the negative affects of pain, sadness, anger and worry.

The research also looks at 163 other nations, and ranks them along with U.S. states. In those rankings, Kentucky is 89th, just below Russia and Uruguay and just above South Korea and Belgium. West Virginia is 101st, just below Sri Lanka and just above Mauritania.

The research is being done by economics professor David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and?the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and social-science professor Alex Bryson of University College London. It is published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit organization that says it is “committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community.”

The researchers write that their four positive measures aren’t just the flip side of the negative measures: “It seems they are, at least to some extent, measuring different things. . . . The implication is that we might need more than life satisfaction alone to obtain a robust assessment of state rankings on well-being.”

The four negative questions in the Gallup Inc. polls asked respondents if they had experienced physical pain, sadness, worry or anger “during a lot of the day yesterday.” The four positive questions were:

• Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is zero, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?
• Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about enjoyment?
• Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?
• Now, please think about yesterday, from the morning until the end of the day. Think about where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, and how you felt. Did you feel well-rested yesterday?

Kentucky’s highest rank among the states and nations, 62nd, was for enjoyment the previous day. It ranked 71st in the ladder of life, 88th in smiling or laughing, and 138th in being well-rested.

The top state in the rankings was Hawaii, followed by Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Alaska and Wisconsin. The bottom 10, starting with No. 41, were Rhode Island, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, New York, Kentucky and West Virginia.

(Photo by Getty Images)

This column is republished from the?Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

?Before we renew the tradition of imaginary but fitting Christmas gifts for Kentucky political figures, here’s a plea for some real gifts for folks who really need them: the people of Ukraine, who are standing up to a vicious bully for our common cause of freedom; and the thousands of people in the upper Kentucky River watershed who still need homes after last summer’s record flood.

The latter plight is in this column’s bailiwick, since some serious political will and taxpayer money are needed to solve it. We can take heart from the willingness of Knott County officials to condemn a needed housing site owned by Western Virginia Pocahontas Properties, which is playing typical coal-company hardball. Those days are over, boys.

And now to our work, begun by the late Ed Ryan as chief of The Courier-Journal’s Frankfort Bureau in 1981: tangible presents for those who have given us so much to write about this year.

Sen. Mitch McConnell: A big magnet, to signify what he wants to be for his fellow Republican senators by resurrecting his 2021 condemnation of Donald Trump when the Jan. 6 committee referred Trump for prosecution: “The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day.” Most of Trump’s legions may not acknowledge it, but McConnell is reminding them of the truth, and it’s decision time for GOP senators. They should “stick with Mitch,” as the senator’s old campaign slogan had it, not kowtow to America’s would-be Mussolini.

Sen. Rand Paul: A wrench, to signify the spanner he threw into the works to keep McConnell protégé Chad Meredith from becoming a federal judge — perhaps the only case where his increasing distance from McConnell has had a real impact.

Rep. James Comer, R-Tompkinsville/Frankfort/one-third of Kentucky: As new chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, a muzzle for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whom would-be speaker Kevin McCarthy will likely put on Comer’s committee to secure her vote for him. Also, one of those big, academic-style laminated posters with all the texts between 34 Republican House members and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about efforts to overturn the 2020 election — to remind Comer just how nutty and dangerous some of his colleagues can be.

Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Bowling Green, incoming chair of the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee: A portfolio of political fact-checker columns to remind the normally responsible congressman that in his new position, he won’t be able to get away with exaggerations and unsupported assertions like those he made about Medicare and COVID-19 in a Dec. 7 interview with Axios.

Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Louisville, retiring after 16 years in the House: a miniature carousel, to signify what he said in his farewell speech: “I won’t miss everything about the circus, and I will miss many, but not all of the clowns.” Might he have been thinking of Kentucky colleague Thomas Massie, R-Garrison?

Republicans running for governor (there are so many they could take up a whole column): An independent broker to arrange a series of forums around the state for the six candidates who have real campaigns. GOP voters deserve real discussions of issues and their backgrounds, not just TV sound bites.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron:? He’s among those candidates, but is the only one backed by Trump, so this suggestion from one of Santa’s elves is too good to leave in the sleigh: The unused “Save America” signs and other leftover Trumpian materials from Herschel Walker’s failed Senate campaign in Georgia.

Former Gov. Matt Bevin: He’s not running, at least not yet, so another elf offers a vinyl record of “Pardon Me, Ray” (to the tune of “Chattanooga Choo Choo”), the parody about the 1978-79 pardon scandal of Ray Blanton, which was so bad that leaders of his own Democratic Party engineered an early inauguration of his Republican successor as governor of Tennessee.

Gov. Andy Beshear: A poster with photos of all 11 Republicans who are running to unseat him, plus Bevin, to remind Beshear that he’s essentially been running against himself in those polls that show him to be the nation’s most popular Democratic governor. Republican candidates will soon compete to show who is the best attacker, and after May 16, it will be one-on-one with the governor.

State Senate Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown: Since he would like to make just about all elections partisan, a monthly report of Kentucky voter-registration statistics. They’ve shown an increasing Republican trend for years, but in the Trump era there’s been an even greater proportional increase of independents. Excess partisanship turns off voters.

To all our readers: Merry Christmas and happy new year — and a reminder that your subscriptions to news outlets support journalism that is essential to a working democracy.

David Hartwell Sawyer III (Photo courtesy of The Rural Blog)

This article is reprinted with permission of The Rural Blog, published by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.

David Sawyer, a Kentucky-grown back-to-the-lander who ran a student-service program at Berea College, helped start AmeriCorps and became an international consultant on the environment, civic engagement and a wide range of other topics, was remembered fondly Saturday as someone who changed people’s lives.

Twelve Republicans are seeking to unseat the current occupant of the Kentucky Governor's Mansion. Eight of them will debate over Tuesday and Wednesday nights in Northern Kentucky. (Getty Images)

This article is published with permission from the Northern?Kentucky?Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.

When Gov. Andy Beshear was sworn in three years ago Saturday, he was a fluke, elected by just 5,136 votes — less than 0.4% of the total — due to controversial utterances by incumbent Matt Bevin. Republicans won all the other statewide offices going away, including a first-time candidate who defeated a former Miss America.

Three months later, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Beshear declared an emergency, followed public-health advice, locked down the state, and had daily briefings that reached Kentuckians in a way no governor ever had. Most gave him good marks, even after he sparked Republican criticism by having police put quarantine notices on cars at the few churches that defied him and held in-person Easter services.

More than anything else, Beshear’s pandemic presence – ubiquitous but not overweening, sometimes clunky but rarely officious, and casting a look of calm confidence – won him the approval of voters who may have known less about him on Election Day than about his father, Steve Beshear, governor in 2007-2015.

Beshear, 45, remains the nation’s second-youngest governor, and after seven years in statewide office — four as attorney general — he occasionally sounds like a suburbanite still getting used to rural Kentucky; last month, he called Estill County’s No. 2 town “RaVEEna” rather than “RaVENNa.”

But what counts for voters is that he shows up in Ravenna and dozens of other places like it, often to show leadership in disasters like the Western Kentucky tornadoes of a year ago and the Eastern Kentucky flooding of last summer. A veteran Washington reporter who was at Beshear’s appearance with President Biden in Breathitt County volunteered to me privately how impressed he was with how Beshear carried himself, and wondered if he should be listed among Democratic presidential alternatives.

No. Beshear is seeking re-election next year, and the presidential race will be well underway when Kentuckians vote next November. But if he wins, he might fit the mold of Democrats looking for a moderate in 2028.

If he wins? That’s now a firm possibility, but this observer sees no favorite in the general election. Most Kentuckians now think of themselves as Republicans, the party has a plurality in voter registration, and Donald Trump whipped Biden by 26 points in the state.

That said, Trump will have less punch next year, maybe a lot less. His 2024 campaign is off to a bad start, and he was slipping in polls even before his anti-Constitution statement displayed his fascist tendencies. He has endorsed state Attorney General Daniel Cameron in the Republican primary, but Cameron is the state’s top law officer, so that partnership doesn’t parse.

Trump could also be for Kelly Craft, whom he appointed ambassador to Canada and the United Nations, and who has less name recognition than Cameron but a lot more money. Her husband, coal operator Joe Craft, is reportedly telling people that they will spend what it takes to win, but his wife needs a message to match the money. She still hasn’t answered a journalist’s question, as far as I know.

The traditional, organization-and-endorsements candidate in the top tier of Republican candidates is Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles. There are so many other candidates that the nomination could be had with less than a fourth of the vote in a small turnout. That must encourage the wealthy Bevin, whose attendance at former Gov. John Y. Brown Jr.’s state Capitol funeral made some people conclude he’s likely to run.

The prospect of Bevin as nominee of a small minority has made some Republicans think about reviving the never-used law for a runoff election if no one gets 40% of the vote, but the legislature doesn’t meet until Jan. 2 and the filing deadline is Jan. 6. (A better change would be ranked-choice or “instant runoff” voting, in which voters rank their favorite candidates and the second-choice votes are allocated to those candidates if their favorite loses; the sequential process produces a candidate with a majority.)

Beshear is running largely on the state’s economic success and calls for teacher raises and universal pre-K, but the foundation of his support is the favorability he earned in the pandemic. That alone won’t sustain him.

A recent national poll showed, sadly, that almost half of Americans agreed with the statement that public-health officials lied about the effectiveness of vaccines and masks. Kentuckians’ opinions are probably not much different, and Beshear’s recent preventive advice has been much softer than it was in the first two years of the pandemic.

The winning health issue for Beshear may be his inventive use of the pardon power to let Kentuckians possess small amounts of marijuana for medicinal purposes. It’s probably not a decisive issue for many voters, but in a close race, it could make a difference. This one, like the last one, is likely to be close.