Gerth: Beshear's first inaugural address had no big ideas. Let's hope for bigger plans now

When he was sworn in four years ago, Gov. Andy Beshear gave what we can consider the Rodney King inaugural address.

It was devoid of really big plans for the next four years. Beshear understood his slim victory over Matt Bevin wasn’t a mandate for him, but was a mandate against Bevin.

Beshear stood before the people on that balmy December day, swore he’d never taken part in a duel and said, “I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?”

Wait.

No.

That was Rodney King, whose beating at the hands of Los Angeles police led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, who said that.

But the message was the same.

“We succeed when we focus, right here in Kentucky, on making life better for our people instead of allowing national divisions to distract us from the work at hand. We succeed when we stop treating each other as the enemy,” Beshear said during his address.

It was less a policy statement than a simple call for civility, which was needed after four years of Bevin and three years of Donald Trump.

But Beshear erred on Day One, when he remade the Kentucky Board of Education and said in his inaugural address that partisanship played no role in the appointments. Then we found out all of his appointments were Democrats.

Can we all get along?

Then Republicans – especially Senate President Robert Stivers and Senate Majority Leader Damon Thayer − got their knickers all twisted over the fact that Beshear was getting good marks for handling the pandemic a few months later and wouldn’t share the spotlight with them.

Fast forward to last month and Thayer was still chafing.

"The truth is, I've learned he wasn't very popular in high school. He was the victim of frequent swirlies where he got his head stuck in a toilet and flushed by people who didn't like him,” Thayer said in a childish pique after it became clear that the people of Kentucky actually, kind of, liked Beshear and planned to give him a second term.

So, in short, we couldn’t all get along.

In his inaugural address of four years ago, Beshear made only a few promises: 1) He would seek an across-the-board $2,000 raise for teachers; 2) He would try to protect the retirements of public employees; and 3) He would try to preserve health insurance for people with preexisting conditions.

He couldn’t force through the pay raise for teachers, who Republicans blamed for Bevin’s loss, but Republicans never did axe the state’s retirement plans – whether Beshear had anything to do with that or not.

And the Republicans have also not slashed the state’s Medicaid program.

So, we’ll give him two out of three – and as Meatloaf said, that ain’t bad.

Meanwhile, he’s got a record on economic development that other governors here and across the country could only dream of with thousands of jobs building electric car batteries coming this way.

On Tuesday, he’ll be sworn in for his second and final term.

Now is the time for Beshear to step forward with some more ambitious goals, perhaps most importantly an effort to help downtown Louisville, which has struggled to bounce back following the pandemic when businesses learned they can work perfectly well with employees working from home, saving the companies tons on renting office space.

His No. 1 priority should be helping convince Humana and Cigna to keep a sizeable workforce – maybe even headquarter its Medicare business here – if their proposed merger goes through.

But he should also offer some sort of olive branch to the legislature in hopes to heal past wounds because while Beshear has been good at governing when the legislature is out of session, he’s not been good at getting his initiatives through the legislature.

And when I say he’s been good at governing, he has.

One area where Republicans tried to go after him was his handling of millions of dollars that went to help people harmed by tornadoes in Western Kentucky and floods in Eastern Kentucky. An audit by Republican Mike Harmon recently found only a tiny fraction of the money was misspent.

But making peace with the legislature would also require Stivers, Thayer and other Republican legislators to put their rather massive egos in check.

That’s a long shot, but they have nothing to lose since Beshear is term-limited after these next four years, at which time they’ll likely install a Republican governor.

So, as Rodney King said, “We succeed when we stop treating each other as the enemy.”

No, wait, that was Beshear who said that.

Whatever, Kentucky will be better off when Beshear and the legislature can find common ground on issues that benefit the state. Can we, can we all get along?

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear's second inaugural address needs big ideas