(top photos: Bryan Woolston/AP/Shutterstock bottom photos:Timothy D Easley/AP/Shutterstock) DISCOVERING HIS ‘WHY’Īndy Beshear grew up the son of a politician. Andy Beshear has focused on health care and education as ways to transform his state, while he works between sometimes extreme constituent responses ranging from adulation to anger. He seems keenly aware of what is at stake in his job, observing plainly, “It is a time when the decisions I make, with good public health input, are decisions that result in life and death.”īeshear says his approach to governing, and his willingness to endure the hosannas and brickbats of public office, were shaped by several influences: his faith, his desire to give his children a decent future, and his experience at Vanderbilt. Interviewed by phone in July, during a week when Kentucky was recording some of its highest COVID-19 numbers to date, Beshear conveys the mix of resolve, kindness and calm-reminiscent of a certain type of youth pastor-that had won him a following. He was elected last November by a margin as thin as a surgical mask, just in time to steer his largely Republican state through a runaway pandemic, the resulting economic damage, and America’s most consequential reckoning with racial injustice since the 1960s. Working between those extremes-celebrity-grade adulation on one side, vitriol with violence on the other-is Andy Beshear, BA’00, the Vanderbilt alumnus and first-term Democratic governor of Kentucky. Afterward, several protestors hung the governor in effigy from a shade tree, as loudspeakers played an acoustic version of “God Bless the U.S.A.” Stuck to the scarecrowish likeness dangling from the noose were the words attributed to the assassins of Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln: Sic semper tyrannis. On a muggy Sunday during Memorial Day weekend, protesters objecting to the governor’s coronavirus-related restrictions on life and business marched to the doors of the Beaux-Arts mansion in Frankfort, where the governor lives with his family, and demanded his resignation. Some praised more than that, calling the chief executive “a hot Mister Rogers,” as well as endearments not quite fit for an alumni magazine. They praised his combination of firmness, compassion and authenticity. The governor’s fans responded by making him something of a rock star, vaulting him into national headlines and plastering his face on memes, T-shirts and socks. “We will get through this,” the governor told them most every night, “and we will get through this together.” updates became appointment television, with many in the Bluegrass State, and even beyond, pouring a cocktail and settling in for their daily dose of statistics, mandates, gentle scolding and reassurance. Last spring, as many Americans anxiously locked down against the blooming COVID-19 pandemic, a sizable number of Kentucky residents found a balm in their governor’s nightly briefings. Andy Beshear, BA’00 (Bryan Woolston/AP/Shutterstock)
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