KET hosted their first gubernatorial candidate forum last night (on education issues), and the guy that is up by a bazillion percent didn’t bother to show up.
David Williams and Gatewood Galbraith spent a good portion of the night tag-teaming the Invisible Education Governor, Steve Beshear, for being a no-show again. And considering the fact that all Beshear would have had to do the entire night is point at Williams and say, “I saved Kentucky from having him cut education funding,” we’re not exactly sure what he was so afraid of. The least he could have done is send his wife to the KET studios, as she appears to be filling in for him at more events than he actually goes to these days.
Both candidates stuck to the familiar themes of their campaigns: Gatewood wants a tuition freeze for college students and a $5,000 voucher for all high school graduates to go toward further educational expenses, and Williams says 16-year-olds should be able to drop out of school if they don’t feel like going anymore, likes neighborhood schools, and really really really hates the Jefferson County Teachers Association with a red-hot burning passion.
The only real news that was made is Williams saying public schools should set aside a “voluntary prayer period” every morning, and that Gatewood thinks children should be physically abused if they misbehave.
KET still doesn’t have embeddable video for some reason, but you can watch the whole debate here. If you don’t have an hour to watch the whole debate, the following two minutes of video are a shockingly good encapsulation of what happened:
In other gubernatorial news, it appears that while the Republican Governors Association is too bright to waste spending any more of its money here in Kentucky on David Williams ads, a shadowy faceless group called “Restoring America” is perfectly willing to drop $177,000 worth of ads on the very lost cause. We won’t know the identity of their donors until mid-October, but early Lex Vegas odds are hinting that Williams’ father-in-law got out the checkbook again.