Democrats hosted Beshear at a caucus meeting to learn from his example. Ky.'s unlikely health care heartthrob

For anxious national Democrats who have pined for a white knight in the health care reform debate, Steve Beshear is starting to look like the one they’ve been waiting for – implausible as that development may be.

Amid a torrent of negative national headlines about the Affordable Care Act, the 69-year-old Kentucky governor – a canny Southern operator who’s spent his career at arm’s length from the Democratic base – has charged out of Frankfort as a kind of ambassador-by-default for the controversial law. He has toured the cable networks, appeared on “Meet the Press” and authored a tartly worded New York Times op-ed telling Republican ACA opponents to “get out of the way so I can help my people.” This week, congressional Democrats hosted Beshear at their Thursday caucus meeting to learn from his example on health care.


He has even fielded a grateful phone call from the president of the United States. Barack Obama called last month “just to say thank you,” Beshear told POLITICO. And this gratitude comes from the president to a state where he failed to get 40 percent of the vote in the 2012 election.

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“He said Kentucky is showing the way here and is showing the nation that this can work and it will work,” the governor recalled. “I thanked him, because he and the Congress gave me the opportunity to do this.”

The way Beshear tells it, “this” is enrolling 69,000 Kentuckians in newly available health coverage programs, a number that has grown steadily and that the Democrat expects to “surge” in the final weeks of the year. As the only governor of a Southern state who has both set up a state insurance exchange and green-lighted an expansion of the Medicaid program, Beshear represents a painfully rare bright spot in the landscape of Obamacare implementation. The state exchange, dubbed Kynect, has been a model of smooth enrollment compared to the federal government’s version, and has absorbed 550,000 web visitors and 180,000 phone inquiries so far.

The final verdict on the program – nationally and on the state level – is far from decided, but Beshear says his mind is entirely made up on both the merits and the politics of health care. From his perspective, voters’ opposition to the ACA is driven largely by a sense of anxiety about how the program may change their lives. If they find a year from now that the law has left their personal care unchanged, or even improved it, public opinion could shift quickly.

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“I believe the pressure will be so great over the next three or four or five years, on the states that haven’t gone in this direction, that they will end up just where Kentucky is,” Beshear predicted. “Their people are going to demand this.”

It’s precisely the message national Democrats are aching to hear, even – or perhaps especially – from a source as unexpected as a pro-gun, pro-coal, red-state governor who once endorsed using state tax incentives to build a creationist theme park.

California Rep. Xavier Becerra, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, called Beshear’s Hill visit “reassuring” to a party that’s been under fire on health care for nearly half a decade.

“I think most of us felt like, this is a story that we’ve been wanting to surface, that it’s got to percolate to the top,” Becerra said. “He came in, very honest, the aw-shucks kind of thing, and said, ‘Hey, we’re making it work.’”

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Beshear was never supposed to be an activist governor, let alone a prophet of health care transformation. At home, he’s viewed as a surefooted but conventional figure, a clever pol who last year named his chief GOP antagonist, David Williams, to a circuit judgeship just to get him out of the state Senate. The Democrat’s wiliness was on display again in the Obamacare debate, when he circumvented the legislature to implement the ACA by executive order.

Until a few years ago, the sharp-featured, snowy-haired Beshear wasn’t expected to end up as governor at all: A onetime wonder boy of Kentucky politics, Beshear lost two statewide races and spent 20 years out of public office before his improbable return to prominence in 2007. A former state attorney general and lieutenant governor, Beshear seemed largely spent as a political force after losing a 1996 Senate race to Republican Mitch McConnell by nearly 13 points.

His fortunes shifted abruptly in the run-up to the 2007 governor’s race, when a Democratic attorney general indicted Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher for violating the state’s civil service laws. Beshear emerged as the victor from a crowded Democratic primary and easily defeated the tarnished incumbent.

Still, the vindication of winning the governor’s office may seem a modest distinction compared to the practically Olympian spot Beshear has claimed for himself these days in the ranks of national Democrats. After spending much of his tenure grappling with an economic recession and a series of natural disasters, Kentucky’s comparatively smooth health care expansion has handed Beshear a possible trophy accomplishment that even his political allies scarcely expected from him.

“He probably would not have had a legacy had it not been for the opportunity to engage in this rollout of the Affordable Care Act,” said Kentucky House Speaker Greg Stumbo, who indicted Fletcher as Kentucky’s attorney general and then tangled with Beshear during the 2007 Democratic gubernatorial primary. “I think he must have done something right in his life, because God’s certainly rewarded him with a great deal of political luck.”

In the near term, the question for Kentucky Democrats – as well as some Democrats nationally – is whether the governor’s good fortune can extend to anyone else in his party.

Legislative leaders say that while voters like the concept of expanded health care coverage, the term “Obamacare” is toxic enough to turn a cheering room into a silent one. Democratic Senate candidate Alison Grimes, the latest up-and-comer to challenger McConnell, has stuck to a generic mend it-don’t-end it message on the ACA, and a McConnell super PAC has put health care at the core of its attack ads. (Beshear predicted Grimes would “win that race” but said she’d be “making her own decisions” on health care messaging.)

Republican state Sen. Damon Thayer, a leading Obamacare critic in the state, said Democrats would pay a price for Beshear’s decision to “channel his inner liberal Democrat with no election ever facing him again in the future.”

“While it appears that Kentucky has done a competent job implementing a website, it’s still a bad policy,” Thayer said, adding that though he has a “good relationship” with Beshear personally, “The people of Kentucky don’t like the fact that he has unilaterally implemented Obamacare without legislative approval, and they don’t like Obamcare.”

If Beshear’s sudden national renown has caught some Kentuckians off guard, his political allies say it’s little surprise that health care would be the issue that drew him into the spotlight. Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, a Democrat viewed as a potential statewide candidate, said health coverage is part of Beshear’s political “DNA.”

“We know that the human side of the story is that a lot of people don’t have it or they’ve lost it. I think Steve Beshear saw that side of it, and then he saw the opportunity to engage it, get out in front and manage,” Gray said.

Former Beshear campaign manager Bill Hyers recalled meetings during the governor’s 2011 reelection fight when the governor would sit down with his electoral strategy-minded advisers and talk about dental work for Kentucky children, or other health issues of importance in the relatively poor state. Hyers suggested that Beshear’s longevity in politics, the plain reality that he’s far closer to the end of his career than the beginning, has been an asset to him in the health care debate.

“It’s not like when you’re running in your 40s or your 50s, when you think you’re going to be president or you think you’re going to be the big thing,” Hyers said. “He ran because he wanted to make people’s lives better … He saw this great tool to make Kentuckians’ lives better and he wanted to use it.”

Despite all his newfound celebrity, the governor leaves himself no wiggle room when it comes to the political future. He said he has run his last campaign and has no interest in relocating to Washington for any purpose; nor has he picked a favorite candidate for 2016, though Beshear called Hillary Clinton an “attractive candidate” and said Democrats have a “heck of a shot” at holding the White House.

But for him, Beshear said, this is the last hurrah: “I have no interest in running for another public office.”