It NOW Appears It Was POTUS Barack Obama Who DISSED Steve Beshear During Navy Seals Fort Campbell Visit. My Apologies For Taking Steve Beshear To Task About It.

AP Exclusive: Obama, not Beshear, skipped invite
By ROGER ALFORD

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) -- Gov. Steve Beshear was accused of snubbing President Barack Obama when the president visited Fort Campbell earlier this year to meet the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden.

But internal emails obtained by The Associated Press show that Beshear was the one who received a cold shoulder during Obama's visit to the Army post on the Kentucky-Tennessee line: The governor wasn't invited.

One of Beshear's closest advisers, Katie Dailinger, had quizzed the governor's secretary, Sally Flynn, in an email on May 6, the day of the Obama visit, asking if she had received an invitation for the governor from the White House.

"No," Flynn responded. "I didn't."

Flynn then sent a follow up, asking if some other Beshear staffer had received such an invitation.

"Not that any of us can tell," Dailinger replied in an email exchange the AP obtained under the state's open record law.

A White House official confirmed that Beshear wasn't invited.

The governor, now running for re-election, was mum about that, despite a barrage of criticism from political opponents and pundits. But in Kentucky, where Obama is widely unpopular, Beshear stood to improve his clout with voters by not refuting the perception that he had snubbed the president, even though critics were trying to paint him as unpatriotic and his staffers were worried about the fallout.

University of Kentucky political scientist Ernie Yanarella said the political storm was great for Beshear because it created the appearance of a rift between him and Obama.

"The governor benefited most from what happened," Yanarella said.

Some in Beshear's administration were worried that the fallout would be politically damaging.

"Let's hope this calms down," Beshear's chief speech writer, Dan Hassert, said in an email the day of the visit.

Such hopes were dashed in following days with Beshear being sharply criticized on talk radio, in the press and by political opponents.

"This was Obama's first visit to Kentucky and it seems, given the circumstances of his visit, that Beshear could've altered his plans to stand beside Obama," the Daily News of Bowling Green said in an editorial at the time. "He chose not to and the reason seems quite simple: re-election considerations."

The Lexington Herald-Leader said "we'd hate to think politics played a part in Gov. Steve Beshear's snubbing of the president." But, the newspaper went on to say, "maybe an incumbent Democrat, up for re-election in a red state didn't want to remind Kentuckians that his is indeed the party of Obama,"

Republican gubernatorial opponent David Williams seized on Beshear's absence, too, suggesting in stump speeches that the Kentucky governor had essentially put his re-election campaign ahead of country.

Beshear was entertaining chief executive officers at the famed horse track Churchill Downs while Obama was at Fort Campbell. Those CEOs, the governor's office said, were interested in creating jobs in Kentucky.

"Steve Beshear went to a horse race because he was worried about his own race," Williams said at the time.

In emails related to the Obama visit, reporters peppered Beshear spokeswoman Kerri Richardson with questions centering on whether the governor had snubbed the commander in chief. Richardson responded that Beshear had learned of the presidential visit only 36 hours before it was to occur, and that he couldn't rearrange his schedule on such short notice.

`"While we tried to juggle the schedule so the governor could be in both places, we simply couldn't work it out," Richardson said in emails to reporters.

Louisville NAACP President Raoul Cuningham accused Beshear of playing hide-and-seek.

"And I think the governor needs to hope that African-Americans will not play hide-and-seek on him this election as he has played on the president," Cunningham told reporters at the time.

Although he has visited Kentucky only once since his election, Obama is a central figure in Kentucky's governor's race. Williams and other Republicans wield his name like a club, a campaign strategy that they hope can chip away at Beshear's 20 point lead in the polls. Obama lost Kentucky big in 2008, and polls show he hasn't improved his popularity since then.

In one of the emails, Mika Rothman, a staffer in the White House office of intergovernmental affairs, notified Beshear's Washington liaison, Rebecca Byers, that the president would be at Fort Campbell "to address service members who have recently returned from deployment." That email included no invitation. Such notifications are sent to elected leaders in any state that the president is visiting.

Richardson declined to comment on the reason why Beshear or his staffers didn't publicly disclose at the time that he hadn't been invited. That disclosure came only after the internal emails were turned over to AP.

"To the best of our knowledge, no elected officials were invited to participate in the president's visit to Fort Campbell," she acknowledged in a statement.