Louisville Courier Journal Editorial Concludes That Steve "Beshear Misfire[d]" With State Of The State Address.

Beshear misfires

In Pennsylvania, Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog) came out of his hole Wednesday and did not see his shadow. That supposedly means an early spring this year.

In Kentucky, meanwhile, Steve Beshear (the Governor) emerged Tuesday night and apparently did see a shadow — that of Senate President David Williams. That may mean a long, trying summer and autumn.

How else to explain why a normally progressive Democrat like Mr. Beshear would begin his State of the Commonwealth address with a breathless assertion from the Rand Paul playbook? “Our families have been battered by a national recession born of greed on Wall Street and reckless spending in Washington,” the Governor told the General Assembly and a television audience. “Kentuckians are rightly disgusted by a federal government that defines fiscal management as the speed at which you can print money.”

The Governor lent credibility to a tea party and Republican myth. Federal spending, deficits and debt are all long-range problems, but they had nothing to do with triggering the recession. Moreover, as the Governor surely knows, almost all nonpartisan economic analyses credit federal stimulus and bailout money with having prevented a financial crisis from becoming a catastrophe — and with having avoided unemployment rates that would have exceeded 15 percent.

The Governor took credit — with considerable justification — for dealing with crushing state budgetary shortfalls by making tough decisions about how and where to cut expenses.

But he is certainly aware of other realities: Kentucky is a poor state, and it is heavily dependent on federal spending, whether its politicians want to admit it. According to the most recent data collected by the Census Bureau, Kentucky ranked 12th among states in overall federal spending per resident in fiscal 2009, receiving more than $50 billion from Washington on the state, county, city and individual levels. Is that spending that the Governor, who has depended on hundreds of millions of federal dollars to keep the state's Medicaid program afloat, would like to forego?

And what is with the “Get off our backs!” bombast about “Washington bureaucrats (who) continue to try to impose arbitrary and unreasonable regulations” on coal mining? Arbitrary? Unreasonable? Mine deaths spiked nationally last year. Mountains and watersheds continue to be devastated by mountaintop removal and irresponsible strip mining. Does the Governor wish to return to the laissez-faire regulatory approach of the Bush era?

Mr. Beshear doubtless thinks Sen. Williams, his likely Republican rival in the governor's race this fall, will embrace tea party attacks on government, regulation and spending. He's probably correct. But that is not reason to repeat the “Aqua Buddha” mistake of Jack Conway in last year's Senate race and think a Democrat can tack successfully to a Kentucky Republican's right.

Instead, the Governor should emphasize his successes in moving Kentucky forward and creating economic opportunities in difficult times, as he did in other sections of his speech Tuesday. And he should direct his ire not at his own party in Washington, which has done far more than the Republicans to lessen the pain of the recession, but at Sen. Williams, whose obstructionism has held the state back.

Otherwise, the Governor risks matching the record of Phil the groundhog — who, according to weather records, is only right 39 percent of the time.