Do you believe Kentucky is ready to elect the first black governor ahead?

Daniel Cameron's answer to that question.

I think we really need to look at this like a chronic disease model and look at this like patients who are on diabetes require insulin.

How officials are hoping to change attitudes about recovery for opioid addiction.

This achievement is as much a global victory as it is a local triumph.

What the state's senior senator has to say about the destruction of the last chemical weapon in the US.

And they decided that it was a very good fit for what they want and a Lexington bus shelter gets a splash of color and a lesson in Latin American culture.

Production of Kentucky Edition is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions, the Leonard Press Endowment for Public Affairs, and the KET Millennium Fund.

Good evening and welcome to Kentucky Edition on this Wednesday, October the 11th.

I'm Renee Shaw.

Thank you for spending some of your Wednesday night with us.

Kentucky's 2023 general election is less than 30 days away.

Candidates are ramping up their campaign appearances and attempt to connect with voters.

Last week, I spoke with Republican nominee Daniel Cameron and a wide ranging interview about his background and his stance on some critical public policy issues.

But there are some questions he has yet to be asked when it comes to race.

Here is part of our conversation.

You have come out rather boldly against the diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs and companies, law firms, and even I think, a scantily known minority management program in state government.

Have you yourself benefited from those types of programs that seek to level the playing field, some would say, for African-Americans who have historically been discriminated against?

Haven't you yourself benefited from those programs now that you denounce?

Well, look, I think what is really important is that if we want to in the Supreme Court has said this, the only way to to stop discriminating based upon race is to stop discriminating based upon race.

And, you know, I'm proud of my record.

Came out of high school with a 4.0 GPA, did pretty well in undergrad and was, uh, did very well in law school as well.

So much so that I got a federal clerkship.

And I think it's, you know, one of the things that I think makes this conversation really difficult is that you look at me and think, Well, you know, Daniel, you've done a good job, but maybe it's because of the color of your skin.

And I want to get to a place in this commonwealth and in this country.

And we're not saying, well, maybe you did that because of the color of your skin.

We're saying that you did it because of merit.

And I think that's really important.

The other thing I'll make.

Do you believe that racism still exists?

The other thing.

Well, let me on that front.

I mean, there are going to always be challenges.

Look, we are a fallen people and sin exists in our world.

And sin will always exist in our world.

It is the hands and feet of Christ.

We've got a responsibility to address that.

And racism is.

And so are you.

And I think, you know, any any of this stuff exists in our world, and we've got to be willing to address that.

But at the same time, you know, look, when I ran for attorney general in 2019, I never once considered, well, because I'm black, I cannot win this race.

And you and I have talked about this before.

And when I jumped into this primary to try to be the Republican nominee for governor, I never thought, I can't win this race because I'm black.

What I thought and what I continue to think is that people here in Kentucky care about your values and they care about your work ethic.

And that is what the ultimate judge and decision should be as it relates to anything in this country.

Do you believe Kentucky is ready to elect the first black governor?

I think Kentucky is ready to elect somebody that reflects their values.

And I happen to be black.

And I would be honored to be the first black American to be the governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

It would be an extreme honor in the same way that I've been honored to be the first black attorney general, an independently elected statewide office holder.

It's a great honor.

And I'm and look, I hope that our kids at home right now that see me and say, because he can do it regardless of political affiliation, I can do that as well.

And I'm honored.

But at the end of day, this is going to be about values.

And you've got me.

Who's going to be willing to stand up to Joe Biden and you've got Andy Beshear that is beholden to Joe Biden.

Now you can see my full interview with General Daniel Cameron on connections this coming Sunday morning at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, 1030 Central right here on Katie.

Now, Governor Andy Beshear says if he's reelected next month, he will serve the full four year term.

The Lexington Herald leaders editorial board interviewed the governor.

He says if he's reelected, he will not run for the U.S. Senate in 2026.

Now, that's the year U.S.

Senator Mitch McConnell's seat would be up.

Senator McConnell hasn't said if he's running again.

The governor says he will serve a full second term and he does not know what he will do after that.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron has said he would serve two full terms if he is elected next month as governor.

The Herald-Leader says it has also invited Daniel Cameron to meet with the editorial board.

But so far he has not responded.

More on the governor's interview with the Herald-Leader and my interview with Daniel Cameron ahead as I talk to public radio journalist Ryland Barton.

The Kentucky Board of Education has approved a list of priorities for the upcoming legislative session.

It includes a proposal to pay student teachers.

Kentucky is facing a teacher shortage.

We've told you a lot about it, with lawmakers stating earlier this year that the state needed to fill roughly about 1500 teacher vacancies.

Now, during a meeting yesterday, the Board of Education suggested paying student teachers $15 an hour that would amount to $8,000 a semester.

Other priorities include fully funding transportation for every school district, funding preschool for at risk three and four year olds, and to fund established programs designed to strengthen the state's education workforce.

The 2024 State Lawmaking session begins January 2nd, and Frankfort Health leaders and elected officials in Kentucky are working to fight the opioid epidemic across the state.

U.S. Representative Hal Rogers has been a strong advocate for recovery and reform.

He spoke at the Opioid Symposium and referenced a newspaper article calling Eastern Kentucky the country's painkiller capital.

He said he wants it to be known as becoming the nation's recovery capital, and this event aims to do just that.

We spoke with experts who touted treatment options they said are pivotal for a person's recovery journey.

I think in the beginning there was more of a stigma because people were just not understanding of opiates and the epidemic.

But as we began to see that we weren't just going to come out of the epidemic and that we were having more and more overdoses, people began to understand that we needed to embrace more treatment options.

And through that, we have had to figure out like, what's going to work and what's not going to work.

And we started to become more educated and turned toward the evidence and realized that medication assisted treatment is the gold standard for treatment for opiate use disorder.

So for medication assisted treatment, we have different programs that people can use, and they would either use programs like methadone or Suboxone or Naltrexone for, you know, maintenance therapies for medication assisted treatment.

And that would treat their long term opiate use disorder.

I think we really need to look at this like a chronic disease model and look at this like patients who are on diabetes require insulin because we never say that someone who is on insulin needs to get off of that and start learning to manage their lifestyle better and start yelling at them for testing dirty for having sugar in their urine.

Right.

And we don't yell at them for what they're doing with their lifestyle.

But we turn that around and we do the same thing.

And for patients that have opiate use disorders, and it's really not fair because their brain chemistry is different and they require different medications in order to stabilize their brain chemistry.

What I like to say that life Learning Center does is we build recovery capital individuals that are released from treatment and released from incarceration.

They have to figure out ways that they're going to sustain themselves.

And that involves getting a career or matriculating to post-secondary education.

We administer a battery of exams to look at interest as well as aptitude.

And we embark upon career opportunities that are in those paradigms for which they had an interest.

Life learning centers put $4.8 million back into the workforce this year at $19 per hour.

These are much beyond living wage careers.

I think that we can do better and I think that we need to do better in Kentucky because with the number of overdoses that we have, I mean, what we are doing isn't working.

So treating people with opiate use disorders differently or telling them that, you know, they just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and do better or just say, no, that's never worked.

So why should we continue to do that?

I think we need to embrace our treatment options that we have, figure out what the research shows and go with it.

We have some very good news about a group from Nelson County.

They are on their way home from Israel.

29 people from the Basilica of Saint Joseph Prado Cathedral.

We're on a Holy Land tour when Hamas attacked Israel last Saturday.

State Senator Jimmy Higdon put out a statement today saying the 29 were granted emergency visas through the State Department.

They are either home or headed home.

We've also learned another group of Kentuckians with the River Lake Church in Glasgow was expected to arrive in Boston this afternoon.

They, too, were touring Israel when the fighting began on July 7th of this year.

The Bluegrass Chemical Agent Destruction pilot plant destroyed the last weapon in the US chemicals weapons stockpile Today in Richmond states.

U.S.

Senator Mitch McConnell spoke at the celebration of the destruction in 1996.

Senator McConnell introduced a bill creating the assembled chemical Weapons Alternatives program, which found safe alternatives to destroy the chemical weapons at the Bluegrass Army Depot.

For many Americans, the international ban on chemical weapons may seem distant from their daily lives.

But for the people of Kentucky, special right here in Madison County, this commitment has been deeply personal.

Unlike most remote storage and disposal sites, Kentucky's chemical munitions sit within spitting distance of thousands of families and young children.

Now work begins to safely close down the plant, a process that will take 3 to 4 years.

Time now for a midweek check in of some major political developments so far this week with Rylan Barden, his managing editor of Kentucky Public Radio.

Good to see you, as always, Rylan.

Good to see you, too, Renee.

So let's talk about the gubernatorial candidates are making their rounds of interviews one on one, either with editorial boards or with journalists.

Governor Andy Beshear talked with the Lexington Herald-Leader editorial board, and he made some news by saying that he was going to be committed fully to a second term.

Tell us about this.

Yeah, nobody had asked this question yet, I don't think, as there's just been a lot of speculation as to what would Andy Beshear, his political future is.

You know, even if he gets reelected.

There's been a lot of talk that maybe he has a future in some future Democratic administration, whether that's in the cabinet or on some sort of ticket.

You know, he is you know, especially if he wins this election, he will have kind of shown how a Democrat mind, how there's a road map for Democrats to win statewide elections in the South.

I mean, he's already done it one time, but twice might really seal that deal.

But he's he said during this interview he committed that he wouldn't be jumping ship for a for one of those types of jobs or running for a U.S. Senate halfway through the term.

So, yeah, it finally answered that question.

He says he's committed to, if he gets reelected, staying in Kentucky as top executive for four years.

And Daniel Cameron's been asked that question before.

I recall someone asking the question a few months ago.

And of course, he says the same.

So how much stock can you put into that?

And Daniel Cameron, we should remind viewers also when he was attorney general, he ran for that office in 2019.

He said, you know, I'm going to I'm going to be fully involved in being an attorney general.

And that's not a stair step to me to be governor.

Yeah, it certainly is.

One of those questions that there's only one answer a candidate can really provide if they were to provide any sort of different answer or hem and haw at all, and they would just get buried by with questions in by political opponents pointing that out.

And as you point out, there is nothing that really binds a candidate to fulfilling that that promise that they made during the campaign season when they're in office.

So minds change a lot.

I'm thinking back to Rand Paul saying that he would be he wouldn't serve longer than, what was it, three terms in office.

And he's made it and made it there.

So, you know, positions of all on these sorts of questions.

Yeah.

So let's talk about there were a couple of polls that came out last week after we had talked on Wednesday.

One was a partizan poll that showed that Governor Andy Beshear had a six point lead over Daniel Cameron.

But talk to us about this.

Emerson College poll.

Yeah, the the the polls showing Beshear ahead keep on rolling in.

Even the ones that Republicans are celebrating show him with you know, with a still substantial lead that one one of them show them the six six percentage point leading last week.

His favorables are still low.

You know, it is also important to question to take some of these polls with a grain of salt, especially after some of the polling that we got to say around seven, eight years ago during the governor's race, when Matt Bevin won in 2015, the U.S. Senate race in 2014, when Mitch McConnell trounced Alison Lundergan Grimes, those were polls that show the Democrats really performing very well shortly before Election Day.

And the results really bore out a completely different result.

Polling has been a little bit better in recent years.

This poll that was released last week tracks with some of the one tracks with a lot of the other polling that we've seen.

But also they have predicted other races pretty well in Kentucky.

So, you know, we'll never know until the ultimate poll on Election Day that shows really where voters are at.

But I think the one thing that gives me some some credibility to these polls is just that they've consistently shown similar results, even between different polling firms.

So a grain of salt.

But the only way you can get a better idea of it is through more data points like that.

But Republicans have punched holes in that Emerson College poll that they say that, you know, Emerson tried this back in the May primary and it didn't really turn out to be the way they had surveyed.

So they are already saying it's not necessarily a valid poll.

Right.

They're saying there's instead and pointed out rightly that Daniel Cameron, the spread of victory was, you know, much smaller in their polling results versus what the ultimately got on on Election Day.

So there is that for sure.

Yeah.

So a final point.

We heard earlier in the program, a clip of an interview I did with Daniel Cameron about race and this governor's race and asking him about his position on programs, etc., and if he thinks Kentucky is ready to elect a black governor.

And we heard his response.

Why hasn't race necessarily been a big conversation in this contest this time around?

Yeah, it certainly it hasn't come up so much yet.

I mean, I think that people have been pointing out that, you know, he's, you know, Kentucky's first black attorney general.

He would be the state's first black governor and he would be the first black Republican governor in the nation.

But yeah, this hasn't really come up in reporters questions with him.

And I mean, I think it's an oversight.

This is an important issue, but it also reflects a bit of of of Cameron's approach to this issue.

And I think in some of the responses that he's provided both to you and elsewhere, he he really doesn't want race to be part of his his identity going into this and that his policies are kind of transcended or his positions transcend race and race above them.

I think that, you know, a lot of his political opponents and others would point out that, you know, as as much as the race is an arbitrary thing, it is a real thing in in both American history and just in how things have borne out and and govern and how things in and how systemic racism is a reality in this country.

And I think that his opponents point out that, you know, that's that's what we've seen in Kentucky and across the nation, especially in 2020, with disparities, disparities and policing and the death of Breonna Taylor, and that they really to wanted Cameron to step up at that moment and and acknowledge that, you know, that race played a factor there.

And I think that that's something he's been avoiding talking about and and it's something that we as journalists should talk more about and talk to candidates more about.

Yeah, well, we'll have to leave it there.

It's good to talk to you always.

Raelyn, take good care.

Thanks for taking.

A new report by the United Health Foundation ranks Kentucky among the worst states for health and well-being of older adults.

Some doctors are working to change that.

Dr. Marcia Rhodes is the chief medical officer for Central Center.

Well, senior primary care in Kentucky.

She says her clinic is focused on delivering care to seniors in a different way.

More And tonight's medical news.

The way I look at it is primary care right now is a one size fits all except for those very young.

We carve out pediatrics for them and we say, because you're very young, we know you have different needs, the rest of us.

So we're going to give you a separate, separate level of care for those of us once we age out of pediatrics.

So whether you're 16 or 18 and then you head on through the rest of your life, it's the same for everybody.

You get the same amount of time with your providers.

You get the same issues addressed.

And for the most part, it's fairly transactional.

When I'm sick, then I go in.

There's not a lot of preventative time spent to try to keep people healthy.

And so when we look at seniors and as you were saying before, more of us are getting older while aging, myself included, and your needs change, your needs change and your health care should adjust to match those needs, whether it's more time spent with your doctor, you know, or just looking at more preventative measures.

But you need that.

Well, when you talk about that, more time to spend with your doctor and you refer to the Oprah level of care, when we go to the one on one with our primary care provider, there's a limited amount of time that's available there.

Right?

Right.

For most traditional primary care practices these days, you may have 10 to 15 minutes appointments by the time you actually get into the room as a provider, see the patient that time is cut even further short and you hear patients say, I didn't get a chance to really talk about what I wanted to talk about.

I really see my provider for very long and I think what we have done with the Center well model, which is a value based care model and we can go into that further, but is to say you need more time.

It takes time for me to truly treat you and to achieve the outcomes that both the patient and the provider are looking to have.

And you cannot do that in 10 to 15 minutes.

Well, you can see more of this very important discussion and the full episode of Kentucky Health with Dr. Wayne Thompson this weekend.

Set your DVR or tune in to Sunday afternoon at 130 Eastern, 1230 Central.

The Lexington Public Transit System, or Lexington, as it's called, issued a contest to find an artist to paint a mural for one of its bus shelters.

Lexington recently chose a local artist, Mercedes Horn, a Spanish teacher turned painter.

She believes that art from other cultures is so important to learning more and appreciating the diversity all around us more.

And our weekly arts and culture segment we call Tapestry.

This is actually my first period ever.

The work commissioned by the Wood Hill Community Center, the gardening club, needed a garden for a garden.

I got into painting because I took a class a long time ago with my dear friend Gonzalez, which is also a very famous local artist, and I enjoy the class so much.

I thought like, Oh, I can do that is this thing I've been practicing.

I just keep learning from the process of being, you know, making art.

This is actually my second mural here in Kentucky, but it's also my favorite, you know, my favorite piece.

I had lots of color.

I love colors.

As you can see, I was selected for the Lexington Bus Shelter contest.

I applied that months ago.

And I think even now that it was a contest, I thought that, you know, like, I probably won't have the chance.

There are so many good actors around in the in the in the city.

So I decided to present the mural and they decided that it was a very good fit for what they want.

And so I want I want out of war and I want a monetary award, which is great.

So it's good that is going to be done by the end of October.

So this combines nature which I love, color where I love and most important, a woman.

As you can see, normally humans are lighting, women are not normally very well portrayed.

So I want to honor as much as I can a woman also this is, say, a dancer.

And I like dancing.

I like dance.

Also.

It's my pleasure to teach Spanish, to teach culture very important.

And I do it through our traditions.

I love involving painting and art in my classroom so much that the students say, Well, are you this the art teacher?

I try to do my best to connect the culture.

They are with the content that I teach in.

Then there is no I can wait any opportunity to integrate the art on it.

Kids have less opportunities to do art during school day, and so therefore I just take advantage.

This piece is called Jungle and we are here are the Latin blend 2023.

So we love Hispanic Heritage Month artists, especially letting artists our showcase mostly on the most of the timber.

And we are really appreciate of institutions that do that and promote us.

But as an artist we are not only doing our work on September, we normally try to do and promote ourselves through the whole entire year.

And so it's it's important that we are recognized through the whole entire year.

So just only for the Hispanic Heritage Month to showcase everything that we can, all kinds of cultures of colors on our food through the year.

We are important and important for and the community and in the United States and that everybody else things you know, realize that.

So I want them to be more cultural and have more knowledge of what we do instead of just reading through all their media.

So I want to be, you know, to learn from the experiences.

The like Strand mural will be up around the end of this month at the bus shelter in front of the Global Lex building on Sales Road.

Check it out.

An organization called Food Corps helps teach students about growing food.

It works with about 250 school systems across America.

And one of those is Perry County, Kentucky.

We'll tell you what students are learning and how they're using that knowledge to put food on the table.

That's tomorrow night on Kentucky Edition, which we hope we'll see you for again at 630 Eastern, 530 Central, where we inform, connect and Inspire.

We hope you all subscribe to our Kentucky edition email newsletters and watch full episodes and clips at KET dot org You can find us on the PBS video app on your mobile device and smart TV, and we encourage you to send us a story idea at Public Affairs at KET dot org And of course, follow us on Facebook X, formerly known as Twitter and Instagram to stay in the loop.

Thank you so much for watching.

We hope to see you right back here again tomorrow night.

And in the meantime, take really good care.

Have good night.