CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Actress Ashley Judd brought her star power to breakfast Tuesday as she urged her fellow Tennessee delegates to talk up the achievements of President Barack Obama’s first term.

The Franklin, Tenn.-based star of “Kiss The Girls” and “Double Jeopardy” said that “with all the obfuscation of the facts, with all the distortion, we have to take the truth and the honesty and the accomplishments back.”

Revving up the crowd, she said of last week’s GOP convention in Tampa that Republicans can’t be honest with voters because “to tell the truth would be political suicide by their own hand.”

Her remarks focused largely on the benefits of the Affordable Care Act that Democrats have now begun to proudly call “Obamacare,” adopting the term Republicans had used with derision.

Judd pointed to the 64,000 young people in Tennessee who have remained on their parents’ insurance and can “focus on building their careers and starting their own income generation. That’s how we stimulate our local economies.”

She also noted that, because of the change in the law, 240,000 Tennessee household are due a rebate this month totaling $28 million from private insurance companies that failed to use a certain percentage of premium dollars on health care rather than administration and overhead.

Judd, who has a master’s degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, spent the remainder of her address on what she called “the sad and difficult topic of abortion.” She said a fifth of all Americans oppose abortion without exceptions and a fifth support it in all cases. She said most in the room probably held views somewhere between those two poles.

“What I’ve always thought, and what I’ve always thought was perfectly logical, is that, if we can prevent unintended pregnancies, we make the need for abortion obsolete,” she said.

She advocated “medically accurate sex education,” adding, “There’s no controversy in making family planning available. Are you feeling me on this?”

Judd finished her remarks encouraging Tennesseans to go to other states to help win the electoral vote for Obama.

“It may not happen this election,” she said, “but I do believe we can turn Tennessee blue.”

Judd is expected to announce the delegation’s vote for nominating Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden from the floor of the Time Warner Arena during Wednesday’s state-by-state roll call.

After the speech, she took questions from reporters.

Asked by Michael Collins of The Knoxville News Sentinel about announcing Tennessee’s vote Wednesday night, she said: “I cannot believe I get to do the roll call. I mean, I love being an American

“To me, it is an absolute honor and privilege to participate in our political process,” Judd said. “I never thought I would be in this position. … Here I am. It’s a thrill.”

Her last question, about Clint Eastwood’s remarks last week in Tampa, drew an ambivalent response. “We all have our own way of supporting our candidates,” she said. “Thank you all so much. I’ve gotta run.”

(Reach SHNS correspondent Bartholomew Sullivan at sullivanbshns.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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