Allison Ball and the Problem With Both Sides

State Treasurer Allison Ball, a Republican, announced last week that she would be putting out the results of her agency’s investigation showing that Gov. Andy Beshear used state funds to limit Kentuckians’ First Amendment rights because he tried to make sure churches didn’t meet in ways that were likely to spread the novel coronavirus. You didn’t really need an investigation to prove this---it was widely covered in the media during the spring that Gov. Beshear and Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer were worried some churches would not follow social distancing guidelines. Ball released an 87-page report on Thursday. It was not exactly groundbreaking. As the Courier-Journal’s Deborah Yetter wrote, “Ball's report failed to track a single expenditure — let alone identify any misspent funds. Her office said it would take too much time.” 

So a politician overhyped something. That’s not really new. But this matters, for two reasons. First, it’s important to understand what Ball is really up to. The Republicans in the state legislature are determined to use the 2021 session to take away executive powers that Beshear has used over the last few months to help the state manage the COVID-19 outbreak, even as polls keep showing a clear majority of Kentuckians approve of Beshear and specifically approve of how he has handled the virus outbreak. So “Andy Beshear is trying to take away people’s religious rights” is a better justification for the coming, unpopular power grab from the legislature, compared to “Andy Beshear took action that probably saved lives but he didn’t consult us enough.” So Ball provided a report her GOP colleagues in the legislature can use to justify what they were going to do anyway. 

It’s worth noting that Kentuckians’ rights to attend church services are important. But the idea that the very-religious Beshear is somehow hostile to people of faith, as Ball is implying, seems far-fetched. There are two actual policy differences between the two parties at play here. One is that the Republican Party in Kentucky (and nationally) is very tightly aligned with major businesses---and many businesses really opposed some of the limits Beshear imposed on them, particularly at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. Preventing Beshear or any governor in future from imposing major restrictions on businesses opening is the real goal here, but casting this argument in terms of churches and religious rights is a more sympathetic one. 

Secondly, there is a strong strain of identity politics in the Republican Party that is particularly hostile to non-partisan institutions and experts and people who live in urban areas. So limits on the number of people who could gather in one place or when businesses could open, requirements to wear masks and other policies to limit the spread of COVID that are being promoted by experts like Anthony Fauci and often implemented first in liberal-leaning areas were always going to be viewed skeptically by Republican elected officials. Again, polls suggest that a majority of rank and file Republican voters are fine with wearing masks. But Republican officials trying to move up the ranks in a party led by President Trump feel some pressure to show that they are on board with the party’s “own the liberals” ethos. So there was Rep. Savannah Maddox of the Northern Kentucky area, who seems to be trying to position herself as Kentucky’s most-conservative figure, not wearing a mask during a hearing yesterday where Ball spoke and other lawmakers either participated remotely or were wearing masks. 

In short, Ball probably didn’t release this report because she thinks Beshear is a threat to the religious rights of Kentuckians. She probably released the report because she is in her second term as state treasurer, and that job has a two-term limit. A person looking to be a team player within the GOP and perhaps be backed as they run for another office needs to take steps to align themselves with GOP business interests and show that they are willing to own the social-distancing, mask-wearing libs. Mission accomplished. 

This episode with Ball also raises another big issue: the role of the media. Last weekend, when Ball first started talking about her upcoming investigation, there was a lot of coverage of her comments from local media outlets that I viewed as overly credulous. Ball, it seemed to me, was about to produce evidence that Beshear had tried to limit some religious services because he was worried about the spread of COVID-19. I was fairly certain such evidence already existed---on the websites of basically every news outlet in Kentucky. Beshear had announced his apparently under-the-radar strategy to keep church members from giving COVID-19 to one another in several public press conferences.

I was right Ball didn’t have real new information. But it’s important for the media to remember this episode and others like it. We are in a period where one party (The Republicans) engages in more misleading tactics, bad faith and outright lying than the other. President Obama never suggested Mitt Romney was born in Sweden or asked the Chinese government to investigate Romney’s sons’ business doings. Much of what Trump said in last night’s debate included inaccurate statements--significantly more than for Biden. One party made a big show of the idea that a president shouldn’t get to appoint a Supreme Court justice with an election looming, then quickly abandoned that principle. Beshear doesn’t attempt to bully reporters in the way that former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin did. 

Also, the Republicans are increasingly invested in a counter-majoritarian approach---they are aware that a majority of the public opposes many of their policy goals (like cutting taxes for the wealthy) so they must obscure some of those goals. (The alternative would be to try to win a majority of voters, which would probably mean adopting a slightly more liberal agenda.) 

“The GOP is counter-majoritarian. But it can't present itself as that and win elections. So it has to be counterfactual too. Making it harder to vote, and harder to understand what the party is about— these are parts of the same project. The conflict with journalism is structural,” New York University professor Jay Rosen wrote recently. 

The asymmetry between the parties requires different approaches from the press. 

“Decades of right-wing smears have driven the vast majority of conservative Americans away from mainstream news outlets into a cocoon of right-wing propaganda,” Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler wrote in a recent essay. “Those mainstream outlets have responded largely by capitulating to the refs: loading panels and contributor mastheads with Republican operatives or committed movement conservatives; chasing baseless stories to avoid accusations of bias; adhering stubbornly to indefensible assumptions of false balance; subverting the truth to lazy he-said/she-said dichotomies.” 

“None of it can or will appease their right-wing critics, who don’t mean to influence the media, but to delegitimize it. None of it has drawn Fox News viewers and Breitbart readers back into the market for real news,” he added. 

“News outlets should feel obligated to offer their consumers truth, rather than balance and equal partisan representation,” Beutler continued. “The idea isn’t that journalists should take sides in grand fights between liberals and conservatives, but should accurately portray the conflicting worldviews that drive those battles. Studiously neutral political journalists can still alert viewers to the fact that the Democratic Party is a descendent of a liberal tradition, while the Republican Party has evolved into something that more closely resembles the authoritarian parties of European democracies. That isn’t the same thing as making a choice for viewers, it just accurately describes their options.” 

Beutler was writing about the GOP nationally, and the Kentucky Republican Party is different from the national one in some ways. Most importantly, it is the majority party in general here, although Beshear did win the most important race in terms of Kentucky-based politics. But the similarities are important too. Bevin seems at times to be imitating Trump, and Kentucky Republicans largely aligned with him and his approach (while criticizing him privately), just as national Republicans are doing with Trump. The media, myself included, has to adjust to a Republican Party that is not the one of our childhoods. 

This is an occasional newsletter on politics in Louisville and Kentucky. You can sign up here. If you have suggestions/tips for stories in the future, email me at perrylbacon@gmail.com. You can also reach me at that address if you have see typos/errors that I can correct for the web edition of this newsletter.