Undaunted: Courage is Contagious

This week, The Contrarian honors Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear

Sadly, there is no governor as practiced in emergency response as Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. He has steered his state through a horrendous tornado, mass shootings (one of which took the lives of two friends), and record floods. The most recent left standing water statewide and twelve people dead.

As is Beshear’s style, he has been everywhere in his state, meeting with residents, coordinating with first responders and—even in these fraught times—heralding the work of FEMA, which the Musk-Trump junta have targeted for elimination.

“On Tuesday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear told Morning Edition that he’s been traveling across the state on a pontoon boat, mourning with the families of recently deceased residents and helping those who were displaced,” NPR reported. With his usual calm, measured tone, he explained:

“We’ve been hit again, and we’ve been hit hard….I was in Pike County yesterday seeing homes and businesses that have just been destroyed, several feet of mud, everything inside just wiped away. Folks that didn’t have a lot to begin with, losing what they had.”

Asked about FEMA, he replied, “What we're going to need from the federal government is approval for individual assistance that will provide some dollars for this emergency phase, for cleaning up. But then that’s up to $42,000 to help people get back on their feet. And we’re going to need that system to run smoother than it has in the past.”

Naturally, he has been asked repeatedly about the future of FEMA. He told CBS News, “I’ve been outspoken on the need for FEMA…. We have suffered loss, and we have suffered damage at a scale I’m not sure a single generation of Kentuckians have ever seen.” He acknowledged that the agency was not perfect, but emphasized that “how they surge resources in the search-and-rescue phase is critically important.”

In a state Donald Trump won by over 30 points, Beshear (who won re-election by 5 points in 2023) has advocated consistently for positions he thinks help his state—whether it is preserving FEMA, vetoing an anti-trans bill (which, he explained, required “too much government interference in personal healthcare issues and rips away the freedom of parents to make medical decisions for their children”), and advocating for women’s reproductive freedom.

For the latter, he excoriated the MAGA forced-birth stance, pointing out the burden on rape victims. “Their policies give rapists more rights than their victims. That’s not inconvenient. It’s just plain wrong,” Beshear said at the Chicago Democratic Convention. He added, “That fails any test of humanity, any test of basic decency, any test of whether you have any underlying empathy. Thankfully, this extremism is being soundly rejected all over our country.”

Beshear might not always produce the sort of fire-breathing rhetoric many in the Democratic base long for. But he defends core Democratic values (e.g., good governance, women’s rights, advocating for so-called red flag laws) with common sense and an emphasis on his personal faith. In the coming months and years in Trump 2.0, he will provide a model for Democrats to talk with (not to) rural voters, farmers, and other groups not normally part of the Democratic coalition but essential to its future.

As he recently told a Politico governors’ summit, “When people believe that you are actually improving their lives, and they see it and they feel it. Now they’ll change the way they vote.”

There are few better spokesmen than he, for example, when it comes to explaining the hardship the USAID freeze imposed on farmers or the damaging impact of tariffs and rolling back green energy investment. “I would hope a president that said we’re going to make more cars in America would do things that helped us make more cars in America,” Beshear said recently. “We’ve announced about 10,000 EV jobs in Kentucky, and (Trump) won Kentucky by 30 points. And so, if you do the math, if he causes us to lose these EV jobs, he is eliminating jobs from the very people who voted for him.”

Beshear continued: “His plans and approach right now risks tanking that economy in a way that will hurt people.” He added, “The amount that gas will cost more will be the ‘Trump tax.’” Reminding voters that Trump promised to lower prices, he pointed out that “in Kentucky, we get hit the hardest, or at least close to the hardest."

And for good measure, Beshear declared, “What we’ve seen since he's been in office is an obsession with ‘culture war’ issues and a willingness to gamble our economic gains on non-economic issues. My hope is that they knock it off, along with areas like threatening our national security with a number of buyouts that could occur in the CIA.”

At a time when Democrats need not only strong voices, but effective ones to reach Americans who may have given up on Democrats, Beshear provides a powerful example of successful governance and strategically smart rhetoric. We at The Contrarian believe that such courage is contagious.

Today, we honor Governor Beshear for remaining Undaunted in his defense of democracy and of the health and well-being of his constituents.