Gerth: Nice-guy Andy Beshear now a street fighter in the ring with Trump's JD Vance

Gov. Andy Beshear has emerged as one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ chief surrogates in the days since she became the Democrats’ likely nominee for president, hammering Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance over and over again.

While some have attacked Vance for saying things like women without kids are nothing more than “childless cat ladies” and that their votes should count less than people who have children, and implying pregnancies born of rape and incest are merely “inconvenient” circumstances, Beshear’s attacks have been more personal.

He hasn’t used the term “Shillbilly” yet — the derisive term folks on the interwebs have used to describe the U.S. senator from Ohio who rose to fame eight years ago when his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy” became a New York Times best seller — but it seems only a matter of time.

“I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like because let me just tell you that JD Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear said the other day on MSNBC.

In the book, Vance tells the story of growing up in Middletown, Ohio, the grandson of people from Jackson, Kentucky, who moved to the rust belt to escape the poverty of the mountains and find jobs in the industrial Midwest.

It’s a story shared by thousands upon thousands of people from Appalachia who resettled to the Midwest in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to find better jobs.

In the book, Vance paints a picture of Appalachians — including people in his family — as dangerous, gun-toting, knife-wielding thugs.

While he never lived in Eastern Kentucky, he claims to share a kinship with people in Appalachia and says he wants to be buried there.

That’s given rise to claims that he’s a pretender.

“JD Vance is a phony. I mean, he’s a fake,” Beshear said during an appearance on CNN.

Cincinnati, just a half-hour drive south of Middletown, had an influx of people from Appalachia in then-downtrodden neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine, and they faced such biases that the city made hillbillies a protected class under the city’s human rights ordinance in 1992.

Despite the fact the book was a best-seller, many people who are actually from Appalachia have criticized it, saying it reinforces stereotypes, fails to put the region's troubles in the proper perspective and is essentially guilty of the same biases that caused Cincinnati to try to protect Appalachians three decades ago.

Where Vance’s story diverges from the stories of so many other Appalachians is the fact that he left Middletown and eventually wound up with a law degree from Yale, got a job in the tech industry, was elected to the U.S. Senate and is now an election and a cardiac event away from being president.

While “Hillbilly Elegy” was panned by many, including Kentucky author Silas House, when the book was first released in 2016 before anyone knew Vance’s political leanings, the criticisms increased in 2022 when Vance ran for the Senate and in the days since Donald Trump picked him as his running mate.

“The nerve he had to call the people of Kentucky, of Eastern Kentucky, lazy. Listen, these are the hard-working coal miners that powered the industrial revolution, that created the strongest middle class the world has ever seen, powered us through two world wars. We should be thanking them, not calling them lazy,” Beshear said on MSNBC.

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Back when the book first came out, House wasn’t a fan. “People continue to ask me what I think about J.D. Vance’s HILLBILLY ELEGY. I was taught that when you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” he wrote on Facebook.

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He then went on to recommend people instead read Ron Eller’s “Uneven Ground.” Eller, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, was the longtime director of the school's Appalachian Center.

In an interview with Politico after Vance won the Republican primary for Ohio’s Senate seat in 2022, House went further, calling Vance and his book dangerous.

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“It’s dangerous because there’s such a lack of complexity in the book in a time when the national conversation lacks more and more nuance. There’s no nuance in the book. There’s a lot that’s false and intentionally misleading, and I always think that’s really dangerous when there’s intentional misinformation being shared,” House said.

“And I think he’s dangerous because he embodies all of that. And it seems to me that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to rise. And I can think of nothing more dangerous in a politician than that,” he said.

More have piled on.

State Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, a Louisville Democrat who grew up in the mountains, wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which she criticized Vance and his book and said with his policies on everything from abortion to divorce he implied women should stay in marriages even if they’re abusive.

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“He then abandoned Appalachia when he ran for Senate, trading in his “hillbilly” rhetoric for speeches about his ‘Ohio values.’” she wrote.

Willie Carver, an author and educator from Floyd County, wrote on MSNBC’s website, “Trump picking this Rust Belt charlatan as his running mate Monday sparked a resounding and unifying rant among conservative and liberal hillbillies alike in my social media feed: We do not acknowledge him.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently that Vance “may be the most cynical major figure in modern American politics.”

Andy Beshear vs. JD Vance

But no one has been more critical and kept up the pressure the way Beshear has — and for very few the stakes are as high. Beshear is reportedly being vetted by Harris as her potential running mate.

To prove his point, that Vance is “a phony,” Beshear noted on CNN that he has flip-flopped on his assessment of Trump.

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“I mean, he first says that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he's acting like he's Lincoln. The problem with JD Vance is he has no conviction, but I guess his running mate has 34,” Beshear said.

It’s unclear if Beshear’s attacks are being coordinated with Harris’ campaign, but there’s little doubt he’s hitting his mark.

The Trump campaign responded with its own attack on Beshear.

“Unlike Beshear, who rode his father’s coat tails into the governor’s mansion, Senator Vance has had to earn everything he’s accomplished in this life.”

And Daniel Cameron, the former Kentucky Attorney General who Beshear vanquished in last year’s governor’s race, took a swipe at him on Fox News.

“I’ll tell you this: There are a lot more people who grew up here in Kentucky like JD Vance than they did Andy Beshear,” he said.

Others have pointed out on X that Beshear didn’t grow up in Appalachia either. (He was reared in Fayette County, which isn’t in Appalachia but adjoins two counties that are.)

A piece in The Nation suggests Beshear is doing exactly what a vice presidential candidate should do, and that Harris no doubt is watching.

She undoubtedly is.

But the question that remains is whether this is part of a tryout for Beshear or if he’s just carrying Harris’ water while she quickly transitions from being a vice presidential to presidential candidate and whether he’ll continue in this role even if he’s not named to her ticket.

Whatever, it’s kind of interesting to watch nice-guy Andy Beshear turn into a street fighter before our very eyes.

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

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: KY Gov. Andy Beshear mocks Trump's Vance as his national profile grows