Hmm. My personal theories are we’ll hear one of the following things over the next three months:
- He’s changing parties
OR - He’s planning to run against Obama in 2012.
But you can change parties and stay in the Senate. If he changed parties now he’d just be an out of work Republican.
As a what? The Dems aren’t wild about him, he’s not going to beat Obama in a primary. And he voted for the Stimulus and Health Care, he’s not going to win a GOP nomination.
He’s going to find some cushy job as a consultant or lobbiest and not be seen in public office again.
Any chance that he’s thinking of mounting a primary challenge against Obama?
The calculus may be that he thinks the Democrats are going to get shellacked in the midterms, and he doesn’t want to be on the losing side. I could see him leaving, then watching which way the wind blows. If Obama continues to lose popularity, then he can come at him from the right.
I’d watch carefully to see how he handles the ‘tea parties’. Some Democrats are trying to embrace them now, knowing a groundswell when they see it. If Bayh suddenly becomes a tea party speaker and starts talking about nothing but fiscal responsibility, then I’d expect him to either flip parties, or mount a primary campaign against Obama from the Democratic side, but on the right wing of the Democratic party.
But my best guess is that he thinks he’ll lose the next election anyway, so he’s bailing. That seems to be going around right now.
Contrary to these snarky predictions, I’d say we have a number of good debate topics – elucidator’s just added an option I hadn’t thought of.
Really? It’s not enough that “his side” goes viciously after his wife? It has to be some hidden scandal?
Evan Bayh isn’t half the Democrat his father was. Good riddance.
And those “attacks” on his wife? You don’t smell a teeny, tiny rat when one of the Senate Democrats working to undermine HCR happens to have a wife who works for the insurance industry? Really?
He was favored to win, so that doesn’t make much sense.
The rest of your post is pure political fantasy.
Calling pointing out that his wife receives millions from health companies a “vicious attack” is a stretch. It’s not particularly vicious, certainly not out of bounds and while it may be an attack, suggesting that Bayh is changing his votes to help his wifes career is an accusation of misconduct on the Senator, not his wife.
A report that his wife works for health related companies is an attack? Seriously?
What Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake did with Hadassah Lieberman a couple of months ago (working pressure to get the Susan G. Komen foundation to fire her) was an attack. (A warranted attack, to some folks, but an attack nonetheless, and I don’t think Hamsher would deny it.) The AmericaBlog post was not an attack. Susan Bayh is a director for a number of companies that have an interest in the direction of healthcare reform efforts. This is actually reasonable information to disseminate.
Bayh leaving the Senate is a blow to the Dems in only a numbers sense. There was never a guarantee that he was going to vote with the party on important issues, that he’d break a filibuster or anything else. But at the same time, he wasn’t a consensus builder, he didn’t try to broker deals, he just was sort of… there. It would be nice if the seat went to a good progressive Dem but it’s Indiana. That’s not in the cards. (Unless John Mellencamp really runs.) There’s something to be said for having a Republican in the seat rather than running into obstruction within the Democratic party. Far less work, far less frustration.
Name a few.
It seems a little silly to focus on a one-sentence comment of some third party to explain Bayh’s departure instead of Bayh’s stated reasons. Is there some reason you reject Bayh’s own account of why he is resigning, Bricker?
That is a perfectly fair and reasonable attack on the merchantability of Bayh. Democrats like to clean that crap out of our party. It’s called conflict of interest. If Republicans don’t think that anything is wrong with such a conflict of interest, then Republicans can expect us to skewer them with that kind of corruption.
I’m not in favor of widespread party cleansing, but Nelson, Bayh and Lieberman are welcome to join the Republicans as far as I am concerned.
You sound like Jim DeMint.
Far less ability to pass legislation. I mean, we could just not run any democrats, and there would be zero work and zero fustration.
If those are examples of the attacks on him that caused him to turn tail and run, then I’d say that An Arky nailed it.
Besides, that’s not an attack on his wife.
These aren’t attacks on his wife?
They’re calling her worse than a whore and saying that she’s glad that the people of Indiana are unhealthy.
Can we make a rule or something against digging through comment sections of blogs to find the worst comments and making it out like you’ve proved anything except that anonymous commentators on the internet are dicks?
Anyhoo, your theory is that Bayh went through the comments of that TPM article, saw that someone called he and his spouse “worse the whores” and decided that he was gonna give up on being a Senator?
No, my theory is that Bayh was upset that people were criticizing his wife for working for a health insurance company, and also upset that bipartisan stuff isn’t getting done.
It’s not much of a loss. What did the Democrats accomplish when they had their “Filibuster proof majority”? Nothing much.
If health care reform is dead for the foreseeable future, and it very well may be, then I simply don’t give a shit anymore about Democrats controlling Congress.
Not if the remaining Democrats have the balls to pass senate rules which allow effective governance by something less than a supermajority. They could straight out lose Bayh’s, Reid’s and Nelson’s seats, and still have plenty of votes to pass comprehensive health care reform, without sucking up to Lieberman.
There are several.
First and foremost, it plays into my own preconceived notions about the world – confirmation bias writ large.
But even setting that aside, as best I can, Bayh’s own words don’t ring true. He makes this decision days before the primary filing deadline, with a hefty campaign chest. elucidator isn’t the only observer to think that there must be some alternate meaning behind the action.
Why does the theory that he left because of left-wing criticism fit the facts any better than the theory that he left because he was sick of the extreme partisanship in the Senate and nothing getting done? Neither really explains the timing better than the other, IMHO.
I think there’s a certain amount of discounting of the official explanation that is fair, but that usually makes sense when the real explanation is scandal, or a perceived inability to win. In this case, it seems like Bayh could have easily publicly blamed division in his party or criticism of his family instead of criticizing the Senate if those were the real reasons.