













Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin moved into his plush first floor office in the state capitol a bit less than a month ago and immediately began fulfilling many of his campaign promises.

Hence the problem.

If you’re a poor person trying to make your way in the Commonwealth – and lord knows Kentucky has an abundance of folks who find themselves in that complicated situation – the Republican now running roughshod over the state is plotting to make your lives that much more difficult. From suppressing wages to making it more challenging to obtain health care to undermining workers’ efforts to organize collectively, Bevin is plotting feverishly to transform Kentucky into a banana republic – a second rate one, at that.

Since avoiding the November polling places as if they were caught in a bear trap, Democrats and progressives have rationalized the outcome of the gubernatorial election, where Bevin outdueled the Democrat, former Attorney General Jack Conway, by expressing the hope that Bevin perhaps, maybe, might not turn out to be all that bad, mirroring the thoughts of Louis XVI as he marched up the 13 steps to the guillotine.

In fact, Bevin is proving to be a greater nightmare than anything Stephen King could conjure. He’s provided cover to chauvinists like Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who refused to carry out her sworn duty and issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, by excluding the clerk’s identity from the official document (by the way, has anyone noticed that the world continues to spin on its axis despite the Supreme Court decision?).

The new governor also has countermanded executive orders issued by his predecessor, former Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, that restored voting rights to about 140,000 residents convicted of non-violent felonies and raised the state minimum wage, setting the stage for what will undoubtedly be a fun-filled next four years.

Down the line he will attempt to extinguish the labor movement once and for all, promote charter schools, and how much do you want to bet Planned Parenthood gets kicked around in the upcoming executive budget, rendering it nearly impossible for women to get the sort of reproductive health care they need?

On Wednesday Bevin released the outline of a plan to make the lives of about 1.3 million low-income Kentuckians even more problematic.

He wants to “transform’’ Medicaid by applying procedures similar to those implemented in Indiana – offering different levels of coverage, requiring co-pays, premium assessments and cancellations resulting from missed payments – all-the-while failing to recognize that if beneficiaries could afford to foot those bills they might not be on Medicaid in the first place.

And he’s moving in for the kill on kynect, the widely successful health insurance marketplace established to assist Kentuckians purchase the coverage required under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, turning them over to the federal government even though kynect has assisted considerably more than 400,000 residents.

“Today he proposed a vague solution to an unclear problem with hopes that it may or may not be implemented at some undetermined point in the future – all for reasons of political ideology,’’ Beshear said in response. “Kentuckians deserve better.”

In moving on these fronts Bevin is proving to be as shortsighted as Mr. Magoo. The sad thing is this isn’t all Bevin’s fault. Sure, he’s unqualified to fill the governorship, having never served in public office and basically vowing to represent only a small segment of the populace rather than the entire expanse of the commonwealth. Already, killing the minimum wage hike and tinkering with Medicaid, Bevin’s disdain for the underprivileged is on full display.

But elections have consequences. Voters knew all that when they slept through Election Day, with only about 30 percent of those eligible actually casting a ballot. It’s not like the gubernatorial campaign was some big secret – news outlets didn’t keep it under their collective hats entirely – but few paid heed, and a lot of folks are about to pay the piper, including a substantial number who couldn’t be bothered to show up to pull the lever.

Bevin’s governing philosophy appears to be fairly simple – if President Obama is for it, he’s against it. The new governor is trying to erase all signs that the Kenyan pretender ever sat in the Oval Office and return to what so many consider a simpler time – simpler as long as you aren’t a woman or a person of color. The president wants to help some Syrian refugees escape obvious dangers – let’s find a way to keep them out of Kentucky. He wants to provide health care options for those in need? Let’s develop a way to make it hard to do just that. Administration clean air initiatives? Burn more coal.

Simply posing as the anti-Obama will only carry Bevin so far – the president will be serving out his final days in office a year from now and the governor might have to find a different straw man to bash. On his current path, Bevin may eventually find that voters have stopped talking about Obama’s War on Coal and start honing in on his War on Poor People.

Nothing he’s done, or intends to do, will assist those in dire need of government’s helping hand. Making health care more personally costly by adding fees, crushing a minimum wage hike at a time when the wealth gap between the upper one percent and the middle class has never been greater isn’t doing a whole lot in behalf of those most in need of government assistance.

But don’t worry, there’s only a little more than 47 months left.

Of course there’s always a second term.



Washington correspondent Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. He currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.