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 parents’ 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.”
As Appalachian scholar Dwight Billings of the University of Kentucky wrote in the anthology “:Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2019, “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’ 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.
Al Cross is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Kentucky. He was the longest-serving political writer for the Louisville Courier Journal (1989-2004) and national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02. He joined the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2010. The NKyTribune is the home for his commentary which is also offered to other publications.
