FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday he spoke with Vice President Kamala Harris shortly after she became the clear favorite to become the Democratic nominee, saying his state’s progress “should be a model for the country” amid speculation about whether he himself is also in the running for the nomination.
Beshear struck a more aggressive tone as he criticized Republican Donald Trump’s four years in the Oval Office. The second-term governor said his fellow Democrats should focus on the everyday concerns of Americans, and he criticized Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump’s newly chosen vice president, as an inauthentic representative of the American working class.
Beshear, who just returned from an economic development trip to Japan and South Korea, said Harris called him on Sunday, a few hours after President Joe Biden announced he was suspending his re-election campaign. Beshear joined the parade of Democrats on Monday endorsing Harris for the presidency.
“It meant a lot to me that she contacted me personally and asked for my support,” the governor said. “I pledged my support. The rest of the conversation, I said, will remain between us. We have trust, and we can exchange ideas and give advice.”
Her contact with his family has been largely restricted to a few meetings over the past few years, but Harris has become familiar with his family, Beshear said.
“She has met my children and always asks about them by name. That’s an easy way to reach my heart,” Beshear said during an interview with the Associated Press at the Kentucky governor’s mansion.
When asked if he was interested in running for vice president, Beshear stuck to his usual line: He loves his job as governor and plans to finish his second term.
“The only way this wouldn’t happen is if I had the opportunity to help the people of Kentucky in a different way that would add value,” he said.
But the 46-year-old governor sounded like he was auditioning for the office, touting the record pace of the Bluegrass State’s economic development projects during his term.
“I believe that what we have accomplished here in Kentucky should be a model for the entire country,” Beshear said. “Not just in winning, but in governing. At a time when the country is at boiling point and neighbors are yelling at each other, we have turned down the temperature here.”
Republicans dominate the Kentucky state legislature and claim that Beshear takes credit for the economic successes they believe are the result of her pro-business policies.
In his re-election last year, Beshear won a number of rural counties that are Trump strongholds. Beshear said Monday that Democrats should focus on core issues that affect Americans – including jobs, health care, schools and public safety – to improve their standing in rural America.
“Democrats need to focus on the concerns people have when they wake up in the morning,” he said. “Concerns that aren’t really partisan, even though everything is partisan right now.”
During his tenure as governor, Beshear largely avoided criticism of Trump, who easily won the Bluegrass State in 2016 and 2020 and is considered the clear favorite to do so again in November.
When asked on Monday to summarize Trump’s legacy as president, Beshear said it was one of stoking division.
“Look, I worked with him and I was able to work with him,” the governor said. “He and his administration took my calls and I’m grateful for that. But pitting people against each other is wrong. It goes against my faith, which is the Golden Rule that we love our neighbor as ourselves. And the parable of the Good Samaritan says everyone is our neighbor. But the leadership we saw during the four years of former President Trump was all about creating an ‘us versus them’ situation in our own country.”
Beshear was scathing in his criticism of Vance, who addressed his own Appalachian roots in his recent speech to the Republican National Convention.
“You can’t just come to Eastern Kentucky a few times a summer and then maybe come to weddings and funerals and then make a judgment on us,” Beshear said Monday. “That’s insulting.”
Long before he became a U.S. senator, Vance rose to prominence with “Hillbilly Elegy,” a bestselling memoir that many said captured the essence of Trump’s political resonance in a rural white America plagued by unemployment, opioid addiction and poverty.
The 2016 book sparked debate in the region, with many Appalachian scholars saying the book traded on stereotypes and blamed the working class for its own problems without giving enough weight to the decades of exploitation by coal and pharmaceutical companies that play a major role in Appalachian history.
Vance grew up with his grandparents in Middletown in southwest Ohio while his mother, whom he introduced in his speech last week, battled an addiction that he said she left behind 10 years ago. He spent a lot of time traveling to Kentucky with his grandparents to visit relatives and said he hoped to be buried in a diminutive mountain cemetery there.
Beshear, the son of a former Kentucky governor, scoffed at this biographical sketch.
“He’s not from around here,” Beshear said.
