Stumble It!
“My decision should not be interpreted for more than it is, a very difficult, deeply personal one," Indiana Sen Evan Bayh told the nation Monday as he announced he would not run for re-election next November. (Getty Images photo)
"One other reason that this story never goes anywhere is that Bayh's image here in Indiana is as clean as can be," writes HoosierHawk in the comments to our previous post, making the case that some Indiana voters who may have supported Senator Bayh in the past are anti-incumbent this year not because of any perceived appearance of impropriety on the part of Susan Bayh but because they are realizing their man in Washington doesn't walk the walk:
I had been planning on campaigning hard against Bayh this election (as I did against his father), but Susan Bayh's being on several corporate boards had nothing to do with it …
You can make the case that he is too liberal or whatever, but convincing Hoosiers that Bayh is corrupt would be a steep uphill climb.
It must be realized that when Bayh is in Indiana, he talks a good conservative line, but then he goes to Washington and votes the liberal party line. Hoosiers listened to his talk, and weren't really aware of his votes.
Once there were exactly 60 votes and important issues were being voted on, we could tell how Bayh was voting. The media reported on the few senators who were crossing over and determining the outcomes, it wasn't ever Bayh.
We heard him putting out the blue dog moderate democrat talking points, but every vote was with the Libs. Bayh lost his "moderate" cover story and got flushed out into open. Hoosiers wanted the admin's agenda stopped, and Bayh wasn't doing it.
Echoing commenter HoosierHawk's on-the-ground assessment, the editors of Investors Business Daily put things in larger context:
Bayh doesn't fit in Middle America.
Don't "bayh" too much of the line that Hoosier State's junior senator, whose father was a liberal senator who ran for president in 1976, chose not to run for re-election because of disgust with all the partisanship in Washington …
Pushing past the prettifications, the main reason Bayh will be leaving the Senate is that he can't get re-elected in Indiana. Like liberal Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Bayh has read the writing on the wall, and the color of the ink is a distinct Brown — as in Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican newly elected to the Senate from Massachusetts.
If only politicians — on both sides of the aisle — and their allies in academia and the media could remember the past, maybe they wouldn't be condemned to repeat it. Ronald Reagan laid it all out in a 1977 "pep talk about how the GOP loss would only be temporary if they learned from the party's mistakes and returned to first principles," as John Fund reminds us in "Why Bayh is Quitting the Senate":
Conservatives, [Reagan] said, should be of good cheer. Democrats win the White House when they campaign as moderates, but once in office they find it impossible to do so even if they want to "because the unions and their Congressional leadership won't let them."
But governing as liberals meant Democrats undermined the trust voters placed in them. They also enacted policies that increased economic uncertainty and retarded job creation. "When liberalism fails, people notice. They may even protest," Reagan told his aides, pointing to California's nascent Proposition 13 tax revolt — the "Tea Party" of its day. "And it's then they'll listen to you again if you have a clear set of ideas based on sound principle."
Once again, as we've done early and often from the start of our Great Tea Party Adventure last winter, we thank you, President Obama, for awakening the "forgotten man"
Let us vote to let freedom ring and to save "The Shining City Upon a Hill."
Posted by: goomp | February 17, 2010 at 06:12 PM
If there is any good to come out of Obama's election, it is that it has helped to shake out America's ideological tree. A lot of the fakers on both the right and the left have been shown to be what they really are.
Unfortunately for Evan Bayh-and fortunately for the rest of us-the last year and half revealed Bayh for the faux-moderate he always was.
Posted by: KingShamus | February 17, 2010 at 09:23 PM
There is another aspect to Bayh's decision not to seek reelection. He has almost $13 million in his campaign warchest.
He could use most of that in an attempt to keep the senate seat, or he can avoid this fight, keep his powder dry, and have a nice nest egg for some future campaign.
If Obama keeps slipping lower in the polls, Bayh will be very well positioned for a primary challenge. It can be difficult to get donations for a primary run against an incumbent, but that wouldn't be an immediate issue for Bayh - he's already financed a campaign that isn't going to happen - right now.
Posted by: HoosierHawk | February 18, 2010 at 06:45 PM
HoosierHawk's observation is completely consistent with what I wrote in response to a Pajama Medias article about Bayh a few days ago:
Back in 1998, I was living in Indiana and I was happy to vote for Bayh because I thought he was an independent-minded, moderate Democrat who wouldn’t fall victim to the demands of his party’s increasingly leftist base. By 2005, it was clear how wrong I was when he was one of the Democrats who voted against confirming John Roberts for the Supreme Court. Roberts is a conservative, surely, but his confirmation hearing made clear that he was eminently qualified and no hard-line ideologue. It seemed clear to me at the time that by voting against him, Bayh was trying to insulate himself against attacks by the party’s left-wing. And ever since that time, he fell right into line and voted with them just about every step of the way–especially ever since the start of the Obama administration. For Bayh to be crying foul now and complaining about the increasingly partisan tone in Washington seems more than a little disingenuous. He could have stood up to the shrill voices in his party at any time during the second Bush administration or during the first year of the Obama administration, but he never did. Instead, he revealed himself to be too much of a partisan, and in the wake of the Brown election in Massachusetts, I believe realized he was going to have a hard time campaigning as anything other than the left-wing Democrat he has become.
Posted by: Kurt | February 19, 2010 at 02:57 PM