Beshear, Lincoln and FDR

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

"[Andy] Beshear was attorney general for four years and ran a winning gubernatorial campaign months ago, but his political career was built on his father’s name recognition and the blunderbussery of the governor who served between them," Al Cross wrote in NKTribune online. "Now we have a better idea what Beshear is made of, and it’s sterner stuff than you may have thought."

Beshear is in pretty good company when it comes to some other underrated politicians who, confronted by dire national crises, revealed their DNA was of "sterner stuff," too. A couple of them come to mind.

The 1860 Republican presidential nominee was a "simple Susan," an influential Republican editor griped. 

The party's standard bearer was "evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis,"  harrumphed Edward Everett, the famous orator. 

"His speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here," lamented Republican Congressman Charles Francis Adams. "They put to flight all notions of greatness."

The object of their disaffection was Abraham Lincoln. (Everett ran for vice president on the Constitutional Union ticket in 1860. Three years later, Everett spoke before the president did at Gettysburg. His words were the ones little noted, nor long remembered.)  

Maybe I missed it. But I've never seen where historians have ranked Kentucky's greatest governors. But historians consistently rate Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt as our three greatest presidents.

Washington was well-nigh universally revered. He was the only president who was elected unanimously via the electoral college--twice. 

However, when the Democrats nominated FDR in 1932, many people believed he wasn't up to the job of tackling the Great Depression, the country's worst-ever economic crisis.       

The widely-read columnist Walter Lippman claimed Roosevelt had neither "a firm grasp of public affairs" nor "very strong convictions." FDR was merely "a pleasant man." In private, Lippman dismissed him as "a kind of amiable boy scout."

"To be sure, Andrew Beshear is no [New York Mayor] Andrew Cuomo," Cross added. (FDR was governor of the Empire State before he was elected president--four times.)

Cross doubts Cuomo's "urban growl" would fly in from Jordan to Jenkins. But "Beshear is mostly soft-spoken, careful, methodical and repetitive, all of which is probably reassuring in a state where the fractionalization of media markets makes most Kentuckians unaccustomed to frequent, extended observation of our governors."

I've interviewed Andy Beshear, but I don't know him personally. Even so, I suspect he'd blush at a comparison with Lincoln, Kentucky's greatest native son who saved the Union, won the Civil War and put slavery on the road to extinction. That's ditto for FDR, who won in landslides, nationwide and in Kentucky, in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944.  

Though I've also interviewed Steve Beshear, I don't know him personally either. But I suspect he'd concede, at least privately, that a lot of Kentuckians voted more against Matt Bevin than for another Beshear. I imagine Andy Beshear would admit that, too.

"Matt Bevin didn’t lose because his policies are out of step with Kentucky voters," Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Joe Gerth wrote. "He didn’t lose because in his four years, he didn’t govern as he promised when elected in 2015. He didn’t lose because of scandal.

"Matt Bevin lost because he is a jerk."

Bevin has "always been a crass, classless, recalcitrant man ruled by demagogic tendencies" and "no respect for democracy," University of Louisville Professor Ricky L. Jones wrote in the C-J.

Cross also wrote that Beshear's earnestness "really comes across." (So did Bevin's bile, boorishness and bullying.)

Beshear, according to Cross, "often refers to his children, and sometimes he sounds like his whole audience is children, without talking down to us. That’s a valuable skill in this situation – especially in a state where the population has probably been more skeptical of warnings about the virus, largely because of its allegiance to the man who for too long was the chief skeptic." Cross, of course, meant Trump, whose narcissism and social Darwininan, phony populist politics are Bevinesque, or the other way around. Trump twice came to Kentucky to campaign for Bevin. 

 "...Crises can change politicians, and reveal things about them," Cross wrote, too. 

"Simple Susan's" signal accomplishment, "historians tell us, was his ability to energize and mobilize the nation by appealing to its best ideals while acting 'with malice towards none' in the pursuit of a more perfect, more just, and more enduring Union," wrote historian Michael Burlingame. "No President in American history ever faced a greater crisis and no President ever accomplished as much."

The "amiable boy scout" "served as President from March 1933 to April 1945, the longest tenure in American history," historian William E. Leuchtenberg wrote. "He may have done more during those twelve years to change American society and politics than any of his predecessors in the White House, save Abraham Lincoln....But his responses to the challenges he faced made him a defining figure in American history."

It's way too early to tell if Beshear will be "a defining figure" in Kentucky history. But there's no doubt he's connecting with Kentuckians via his live-streamed daily updates on the coronavirus. Salon's Erin Keane called them "a sort of Fireside Chat for the Facebook Live era." 

I've only heard recordings of FDR's famous radio messages. But Susie and Diehl Vest, my union card-carrying devoutly Democratic maternal grandparents who voted for Roosevelt four times, seldom missed a Fireside Chat. "It was like the president was in the room with you," they told their grandson.

The governor's video chats "live-streamed daily at 5 p.m. Eastern time (4 in my neck of the westernmost Kentucky woods), have become must-see and -listen events for Kentuckians thanks to Beshear's combo of trustworthy information, empathy, and uplifting we're all in this together messages." Keane wrote.

Maybe Beshear is no Cuomo, who is inviting comparisons to Roosevelt. But Beshear and Cuomo are displaying qualities that mirror those of FDR as he led the country first though the Great Depression and then during World War II.