Kentucky's Democratic governor is touring the country, releasing a book, and road-testing presidential talking points, all while insisting he hasn't decided whether to run in 2028.
Andy Beshear showed up at the Kentucky Distillers' Association meeting in Louisville last week with a familiar complaint about tariffs and a less familiar pitch: that Democrats need to stop talking like activists and start talking like neighbors. The two-term governor, who also chairs the Democratic Governors' Association, used the industry gathering to press the Trump administration on trade policy while floating a broader vision he calls "The Great American Reset", a concept that doubles as the thesis of his forthcoming memoir.
The book, Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country, is set for release by St. Martin's Press. Its title borrows from Jesus's instruction to follow the example of the Good Samaritan. Beshear, who is a few months shy of 49, told CBS News correspondent Robert Costa that he will not make a decision about a 2028 presidential bid until after the midterm elections and after consulting with his wife and two children. That timeline leaves plenty of room for the kind of early-state courtship he is already doing.
Beshear's sharpest policy argument at the Louisville event centered on bourbon, Kentucky's signature export and a $9 billion annual contributor to the state economy. He told the distillers' gathering that bourbon sales in Canada have fallen 85 percent, a figure he attributed to the broader U.S.-Canada conflict even before formal tariffs took effect.
"The fight with Canada, even before tariffs, has bourbon down 85% in that country," Beshear said. "And listen, I'm not blaming Canadians, but this president's insulted them."
The bourbon industry's anxiety is real, even if Beshear's framing is designed to serve his own political interests. Kentucky produces 95 percent of the world's bourbon supply, and the state's distillers were already dealing with fallout from earlier rounds of trade friction. AP News reported that a record 14.3 million barrels of bourbon were aging in Kentucky warehouses, creating inventory concerns compounded by declining alcohol consumption among younger adults. The European Union's previous retaliatory tariff caused American whiskey exports to the EU to drop 20 percent, costing distillers more than $100 million in revenue between 2018 and 2021, the New York Post reported. A new 50 percent EU tariff on American whiskey loomed over the industry as well.
Victor Yarbrough, CEO of Louisville-based Brough Brothers Distillery, put it bluntly: "We are collateral damage." Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky's senior senator, offered his own warning: "At the end of the day, tariffs drive up the cost of the goods and services we all rely on, and American consumers pay the price."
Beshear's complaint about tariff instability, "It's not just the imposition of tariffs, it's this month-to-month, I may do it to you at any moment policy. You can't create stability", echoes what distillers themselves have said. But his willingness to blame the president personally, rather than focus on the mechanics of trade negotiation, reveals how thoroughly the bourbon issue has become a campaign prop. Bourbon production cannot simply be relocated to another country. That reality gives any Kentucky politician standing to push back on trade disruptions. Beshear is using it as a springboard for something bigger.
The more revealing part of Beshear's Louisville appearance had nothing to do with tariffs. He argued that Democrats have alienated ordinary voters by adopting what he called "advocacy-speak", clinical terminology that obscures plain human problems.
"We've got to sound like normal human beings. I think that it was advocacy-speak that was meant for the right things, right? It was meant to reduce stigma, but I don't think you reduce stigma by changing words. You reduce stigma by changing hearts. You think about the term 'food insecurity', it doesn't convey what that person is going through. It doesn't convey your compassion for trying to make sure everyone has enough to eat, like the word hunger does."
This is a familiar critique, one that centrist Democrats and conservative commentators have made for years. Beshear is packaging it as a credential: proof that he, unlike the coastal wing of his party, can connect with voters who find progressive vocabulary alienating. Whether his party is willing to listen is another question entirely. The Democratic base that selects presidential nominees has shown little appetite for abandoning the language of identity politics and activist academia, no matter how many elections it costs them.
Beshear also went after Vice President J.D. Vance on the subject of faith, framing the contrast as a matter of character rather than theology. He accused Vance of using religion to judge and demean people, and he called Vance's bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy an exercise in "poverty tourism."
"I see JD Vance using it to kick them while they're down. I see the arrogance, which he goes about his job and his life using faith to judge people, to demean people. Engaging in the poverty tourism that his book 'Hillbilly Elegy' was, judging our people and claiming the people of Appalachia are lazy and that addiction is their fault, when opioid companies sent hundreds of pills into counties for every man, woman and child that lives there."
Beshear's characterization of Vance's book strips away its actual argument, that cultural dysfunction and personal agency both play roles in Appalachian poverty, and replaces it with a caricature. Vance wrote about his own family and community with a mix of affection and hard honesty. Reducing that to "poverty tourism" is a political move, not a literary critique. Beshear is betting that voters in states like Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia will accept his version of the story over Vance's own words.
On the broader question of Democrats and faith, Beshear made a more substantive case. He argued that biblical principles align with Democratic policy goals like food assistance, and he accused the Trump administration of trying to cut SNAP benefits, the federal food-stamp program, during a government shutdown "for the first time in history, to use starving Americans as leverage."
"Democrats are fighting to make sure there is food assistance for all of America's children, that kids don't go to school hungry, that seniors don't go to bed hungry. And look at what Donald Trump tried to do: He tried to cut SNAP benefits during a shutdown for the first time in history, to use starving Americans as leverage. That's not Christian. It's not the right thing to do."
That claim, that the administration tried to weaponize SNAP during a shutdown, is Beshear's characterization. The information provided does not independently verify the specifics of his allegation, and reasonable people can disagree about the mechanics of government-shutdown negotiations without one side claiming a monopoly on Christian virtue.
Beshear insists he has not made up his mind about running for president. He says the decision will come after the midterms and after family conversations. But the infrastructure of a campaign-in-waiting is visible to anyone paying attention.
Earlier this spring, Beshear appeared at South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn's fish fry, an event long regarded as a proving ground for Democratic presidential hopefuls. He is releasing a memoir with a major publisher. He is chairing the Democratic Governors' Association. He is giving national interviews that frame his record as a template for a party that has lost the popular touch.
Beshear's résumé, one term as Kentucky's attorney general, two terms as governor, mirrors the trajectory of past Democratic presidents he invoked by name. He pointed to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as examples of Southern governors who won the White House, and he praised Clinton as "someone who was good at being president" and "the last president to run a surplus." He credited Clinton's success in part to "that outsider's perspective of having been a governor, where you have to run a balanced budget every single year."
When pressed about the "nepo baby" criticism that follows any second-generation politician, his father, Steve Beshear, also served as Kentucky's governor, the younger Beshear had a practiced answer ready.
"Yes, sometimes people try to do the 'nepo baby' deal with my dad being governor, and they look at me and they say, 'How old were you when your dad was elected governor?' And I look at them and say, 'Thirty.' As a lawyer, I did more free legal work for that man than anybody in my lifetime. He has still yet to repay me!"
It is a polished line. Whether it answers the underlying concern, that name recognition and political networks matter more than merit in American dynasties, is debatable.
Beshear's book title borrows from the parable of the Good Samaritan, and his concept of "The Great American Reset" borrows from the same well of aspirational vagueness that fuels most pre-campaign memoirs. In his telling, the reset is about treating political opponents as neighbors rather than enemies.
"We've lived through a civil war. We've lived through McCarthyism, which by the way, Donald Trump is engaging in right now. Yeah, we can get beyond this. It's the idea that your neighbor isn't the enemy from within; it's just your neighbor, and he or she is doing their best in a very difficult world. Shouldn't we show them more kindness and less judgment? Our communion table is open to everybody."
Set aside the accusation that the current president is practicing McCarthyism, a claim Beshear drops without evidence or specifics. The broader pitch is one of tone: be kinder, be less judgmental, talk like a normal person. It is a message designed to appeal to voters exhausted by political combat. It is also a message that costs nothing and commits to nothing. "Be nicer" is not a governing philosophy. It is a bumper sticker.
The question for Beshear, and for the Democratic Party, is whether a red-state governor who won two terms in Trump country can translate that record into a national primary campaign without being consumed by the same progressive base he is gently criticizing. Carter and Clinton both managed it. Both also governed in a Democratic Party that looked very different from the one Beshear would face in 2028.
Beshear is selling normalcy to a party that has spent a decade rewarding the opposite. If he runs, the primary will tell us whether Democrats actually want what he is offering, or whether they just like the sound of it from a safe distance.
