Below The Fold

I guess I’ll add my voice to the chorus of writers with an interest in Congressional reform offering praise to Evan Bayh’s guest Op-Ed in yesterday New York Times. Not only does Bayh identify issues like the filibuster and campaign finance demands as major obstacles to functioning governance, he actually brings proposals to reform them. He doesn’t go as far as I’d like, which is to say I think his ideas are still sub-optimal, but they’re a step in the right direction, which is better than nothing.

However, Bayh being, well, Evan Bayh, he just can’t resist indulging in the elitist/centrist wankery of yearning for the comity of yore. You see a lot of this in the commentary from the Broderian circle of Beltway pundits, and the implicit premise is that partisan identification is basically arbitrary, and of no more significance than, say, which football team you root for. It’s as though they really do imagine there’s some singular, obvious, solution to the problem, and the only thing preventing it from being enacted is partisan squabbling, with the solution being that everyone should “put politics aside” and agree on things. Completely foreign to this worldview, of course, is the idea that partisan identification actually says things abouta persons beliefs, values, and ideological convictions. It doesn’t recognize that people actually disagree about issues, or that that these differences are sometimes irreconcialable. It is, in other words, the way someone without a single deeply held conviction, or a sense of purpose about issues, would look at politics. And for as much as I might want to credit the guy for calling attention to the problems in the Senate, I just can’t get over that such emptiness really is the essence of Evan Bayh’s being.

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I guess I should be happy enough that Evan Bayh has decided to take the occassion of his retiring in the face of Congressional dysfunction to call out the filibuster, but like apparently everyone else I can only muster one reaction; if Bayh thinks this is so serious, why isn’t he staying around to change things? Like everything else in Bayh’s political career, it’s a nice sounding quote that makes him look serious about tackling problems, but when push comes to shove he’s just not interested in tangling himself up in the nuts and bolts of doing anything legislatively. You can say similar things about this “defense” of Bayh from Jon Alter:

I’m not sure people realize just how much the failure of health care demoralized Evan Bayh. As I learned in reporting for my upcoming book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, out in May, White House aides David Axelrod and Jim Messina visited the Senate just before the August recess last year and left feeling much better after hearing from Bayh. He made them feel that the politics of getting reelected demanded passage of the bill, which at the time looked iffy. “We’re all screwed if you don’t get something real on health care,” Bayh told them. This made Axelrod and Messina think that the moderates would be on board.

That’s nice and all, but it leads to an obvious question: if Bayh thought healthcare reform was so important, why didn’t he stand up and fight for it? After all, the process would have been helped immensely by having someone with Bayh’s centrist credentials with the establishment press defending the effort and voicing full support for reform. Especially when the Senate was deliberating over the bill, a strong defense from Bayh actually could have made a big difference. Except, Bayh was basically silent on healthcare reform. So color me less impressed than Alter. And consider most of my impressions of Bayh reinforced; he’s a lazy, disinterested office holder who was only interested in being a legislator to the extent it helped him become President. He was never interested in doing anything with the office. Hell, his name wasn’t even on the vaunted budget commission he’s reportedly pissed didn’t clear a Senate vote. Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg did the lifting on that.

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by Brien Jackson

I don’t have a whole lot of original things to say about the news that Evan Bayh is going to retire rather than seek re-election this year. Yes Bayh was facing a tougher challenger than he’s used to, but Coats is a flawed candidate, and given Bayh’s stature in the state I have a hard time imagining him losing to Coats, even in a Republican year. And in any event, I don’t think Bayh would retire rather than face a difficult election. Rather, I think the most cynical answer is also the most obviously correct one; realizing that he’s never going to be President, Bayh simply has no interest in government anymore. He doesn’t particularly care for the rigors of being a member of Congress, especially one with so little institutional clout. He’s always wanted to be President, but unfortunately for him he never realized that positioning yourself as far away from your party’s national median voter isn’t a good way to do that. To say nothing of routinely insulting your own party. And in quintessential Bayh fashion, he lashed out at the party who denied him a chance at the Presidency by announcin his retirement a day before the deadline to file for the state primary, more or less guaranteeing they won’t have a chance to hold the seat. Stay classy Evan.

As for Bayh’s legacy, well, what can you say about the guy?  He spent a lot of time talking about the deficit, while favoring a lot of budget policies like the Iraq war and large tax cuts (he was especially disdainful of the estate tax). In 12 years of being in the Senate he managed to go without a single major accomplishment, even though he was regularly close to the chamber’s pivot point. I think Matt has exactly the right way of looking at it; Bayh spent his formative years watching his dad be a truly dedicated Senator working dilligently on policy issues and amassing a record of legislative accomplishments, only to have it ultimately come back to cost him his seat, losing to Dan Quayle of all people. Evan clearly concluded that the way to go about life as a Senator was to do nothing more than rhetorically positioning yourself in the middle of every debate while echoing the favored platitudes of Washington Post editorial writers. And to some extent it worked; Bayh was always presented as a Congressional centrist, made lots of Sunday show appearances, and was beloved by the Washington Post. But it had a downside as well, alienating him from his national party, more or less eliminating any chance he had of ever becoming more than a marginal Senator from a red state. And now, he’s leaving the Senate after serving fewer terms than his father, so in the end, although if he weren’t so clearly disinterested in it all it’s possible he could have had more.

In the end, however, I imagine Evan will wind up as little more than a historical footnote in his father’s biography, and future generations of political scientists and observers will note that Birch Bayh was such a respected political figure with such a force of reputation that his coattails even managed to create a political career for his useless, vapid son. And a fitting legacy (for Evan), it will be. Good-riddance.

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