Beshear Round Two: ‘People Are Going to Die Out Here’

Apparently unsatisfied with his rambling and ineffective performance Tuesday night, former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear embarrassed himself further Wednesday morning by claiming President Donald Trump’s policies are going to kill people.

“There are people out here that get affected by all the policies that he is talking about doing. With the Affordable Care Act, you know, if they pull back coverage from millions of Americans, people are going to die out here,” Beshear said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“People are going to die out here.”

“That may sound dramatic but that’s just the facts and doctors will tell you that,” claimed Beshear. “It’s time that he understands that real people are involved here,” he said.

Those are hardly uncontested facts and most doctors won’t tell you that. The charge that Trump’s Obamacare reform will leave people vulnerable is a weak one, especially after what the president said to Congress Tuesday night about ensuring Medicaid flexibility.

“We should give our great state governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out,” Trump said during his first address to a joint session of Congress.

Having accused Trump of being indifferent to human suffering, Beshear then claimed that the Trump administration was “indiscriminately seizing people off the streets to deport them.”

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Beshear’s comments Wednesday morning echo his Tuesday night performance, during which he said Republicans think “that folks at the lower end of the economic ladder just don’t deserve health care” and implied that Trump is a xenophobe.

“It taught me to embrace people who are different from me, not vilify them,” Beshear said, “The America I love has always been about looking forward, not backward, about working together to find solutions … instead of allowing our differences to divide us.”

Tellingly, however, when Beshear wasn’t hurling hyperbolic accusations at Trump to please radical progressives, he was doing his best to sound like Trump and make appeal to moderate, working-class voters.

“I may be old-fashioned, but I still believe that dignity, compassion, honesty, and accountability are basic American values,” he said. “I believe that if you work hard, you deserve the opportunity to realize the American Dream,” Beshear continued.

Old-fashioned? American values? The American Dream? Are these not all things which the Democrats have spent the last decade happily dismissing? Beshear’s sloganeering then went populist.

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“Our political system is broken. It’s broken because too many of our leaders think it is all about them. They need to remember that they work for us and helping us is their work,” he said.

The entire response itself was a transparent attempt to do damage control with white, working- and middle-class voters. After eight divisive years of President Obama followed by a tone-deaf campaign from Hillary Clinton and capped off with a leadership race between two radicals obsessed with identity politics, the Democrats have successfully alienated their former base.

It was all they could do to send in Beshear, the soft-spoken Mr. Rogers of the Democratic Party — flanked almost entirely by white voters and standing in that great bastion of nostalgic Americana itself, the roadside diner — to reach out to white Americans and ask them once again, “Will you be my neighbor?”