"He's singing the Trump song and dance"
Joe Gerth is a columnist at the Courier-Journal, where writes compelling, deeply-engaging pieces on a wide range of subjects. But most of his career was as a reporter, often focusing on politics in Louisville and Kentucky.
In our recent conversation, Joe went in-depth about his thoughts on Kentucky’s gubernatorial candidates, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, Attorney General Daniel Cameron. (This is a condensed version of that conversation.)
Compared to other governors of Kentucky, what’s been unique about Beshear?
More than anything, it's his high approval numbers. He has remained amazingly popular in Kentucky. I mean the numbers have shown his popularity at 64, 65% …and that’s been since the start of when he became governor.
It’s kind of odd because he barely won the governorship. But soon after he took office, we had the pandemic hit, he was given high marks for his handling of that, at least early on, and he's been able to maintain that somehow.
Also, he's the first Democratic governor in Kentucky's history to ever have both a Republican House and a Republican Senate that he's had to deal with. That has put him policy-wise in a tough position. So everything that you see him doing right now is through executive actions.
I assume you've not spent a ton of time studying Kentucky attorneys general, but how has Cameron been unique in that role?
He has been one of the most political attorney generals, the most political since Greg Stumbo and possibly more so. He doesn’t seem to do very much that’s not somehow politically motivated. He spends a lot of his time signing onto these Republican Attorneys General Association lawsuits, when they're suing the federal government.
If you look at the things he’s done on open records, the attorney general of Kentucky has a lot of power when it comes to open records, because his rulings carry the weight of law unless and until a court overturns him. And he has appeared to ignore a lot of precedent in making rulings in an attempt to kind of shut down some of the openness of Kentucky government.
As a campaigner, he has consistently said that he backs the blue—the police departments of the state of Kentucky. And he proved that in the Breonna Taylor case.
It took the DOJ to come in and to file charges against some of the officers who were involved in getting that search warrant who didn't quite tell the truth.
I'm inclined to vote for Beshear. I'm guessing you are too. Are there any things you don't like about him?
Beshear’s been far from perfect. They had some problems with unemployment during the pandemic. His office did not handle that well.
He came into office and made a couple of mistakes early on with appointments. He got rid of Bevin’s state Board of Education, and when he appointed his own, he did not appoint a single Republican to it. There's no doubt he could have found some Republicans that he liked and got along with. Certainly there were a lot of Republicans in Kentucky who voted for him because they did not like Matt Bevin.
But it’s been a fairly scandal-free administration. And I think if you look at the results that he's gotten, the state is doing very well financially right now. He has brought in some very good businesses.
He’s made some mistakes. But on the whole, it's been a pretty strong administration.
Anything you like about Cameron?
Cameron is a very likable guy. …He seems to be a good campaigner.
But policy-wise, he's singing the Trump song and dance right now, and I think that's problematic. It’s going to help him in the election, since there are a lot of Trump supporters in the state, but it doesn’t quite do it for me.
When you say he's singing the Trump song and dance, what do you mean?
He is the attorney general of Kentucky, but he will not criticize Trump for anything that he’s done, despite the fact that he's been indicted now by the Manhattan district attorney and by the DOJ. And it is headed toward what looks to be a couple more indictments possibly within the next few weeks.
He is so completely in Trump's corner. As far as I know, he has never criticized him.
He waves the Trump endorsement around like it’s the end all be all.
What would you expect of a Governor Cameron in office? After all, the legislature is already passing a lot of conservative policies and then overriding Beshear’s vetoes.
He would certainly be in a position more to lead, in terms of what sort of legislation passes. But like you said, Kentucky is a conservative state now. It's got a conservative legislature, and they're remaking our laws in a very, very conservative way.
Beshear has been able to not go as forcefully as the Republicans might like him to go, in putting into practice the laws that they've passed. They passed Senate Bill 150, which goes after trans kids. The Beshear administration's education department has put out guidelines that basically said that the school districts can either do things or not do things, because of what appears to be a drafting error in the legislation.
We know for a fact that Cameron would not issue that sort of guidance, because he put out an opinion on the state law and what school districts need to do that was in direct opposition to what the Beshear education department said.
So what you're gonna see is a little bit more hardcore Republican efforts to put laws into effect. But what exactly those might be, it’s hard to say at this point.
How do you think Beshear might govern in a second term, freed from having to worry about re-election?
That's hard to say. He has done much of what he has wanted to do. He's pushed the envelope on certain issues, like during the pandemic. He's pushed back on the legislature on a number of issues. He’s vetoed a lot of stuff, although his vetoes haven’t withstood overrides.
Looking for experts
I (Perry) am looking for more experts to interview. Expertise isn’t just having a big title or fancy job, or restricted to only politicians, academics and journalists. It’s deep knowledge of a particular subject. The areas of focus for this newsletter are:
A. policy (how do we reduce say, murders and also incidents of police brutality, what is the best way to select students for magnet schools);
B. governance (how many people are getting the covid-19 vaccine, how quickly are roads being paved);
C. elections; and
D. culture (what does the growth of non-denominational Christian churches and the decline of traditional denominations such as Methodists tell us about Americans’ religious beliefs and practices.)
It looks like I am interviewing a much higher percentage of white men than is in the population of Louisville or the U.S. That tells me I am likely missing some experts who aren’t white men, so perhaps you can help me in that area in particular. The interviewee does not necessarily have to live in Louisville or Kentucky but hopefully their expertise is relevant to Louisville and Kentucky.
I recently spoke to Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst on Beshear v. Cameron and Siddhant Issar, a University of Louisville political science professor who studies race, class and capitalism.
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