Bye Bye Bayh

I didn’t count the number of articles and editorials this week that bemoaned Evan Bayh’s decision not to run for reelection but there were a lot of them. Bayh is another of a growing number of members of Congress who have decided for various reasons that now is a good time to exit the public stage. Bayh’s reason was the growing partisanship in Congress. Or so he said.

"There is too much partisanship and not enough progress -- too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving," Bayh said. "Even at a time of enormous challenge, the people's business is not being done."

Interesting comments from the man who voted against the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice to be George Bush’s Secretary of State. Only 13 other Democrat senators agreed with him.

Bayh was one of only 22 senators – all of them Democrats (including Barack Obama) – who voted against the confirmation of John Roberts, Bush 43’s nominee for Chief Justice.

Bayh joined 40 Democrat senators (including Obama) to vote against the confirmation of Sam Alito’s nomination by George Bush to the Supreme Court after hearings that were so partisan Martha Alito left the hearing chamber in tears.

Like John Kerry (who claimed he voted against the Iraq war after he voted for it), Bayh co-sponsored the war resolution and then voted against the surge, the same surge that which Harry Reid said was pointless because the war was lost. (That was before it worked. Now Reid points to the surge as Obama's Iraq strategy.)

Last year’s bitterly divisive senate vote on healthcare reform got Bayh’s vote.

Bayh, like every senator ought to vote his conscience and represent his constituents, and hopefully he has. But his public persona as a moderate doesn’t seem to be borne out in his voting record. “I don’t see him as Mr. Bipartisan,” one GOP aide was reported in this week’s news to have said of Bayh.

Washington is a frustrating place to be just now. Obama’s signature domestic achievement, healthcare “reform” is stalled, not for a lack of clout but for a lack of leadership. And the American people are solidly against it, not because Obama hasn’t explained it to them in one-syllable words, but because they’re better informed about the shenanigans in Washington than ever before and have read enough in the news to know Obamacare is going to change their healthcare, which they happen to like just as it is, thank you very much.

A CNN poll this week reported that 52% of those polled believed Obama didn’t deserve a second term as president. CNN, no shill for the right wing of the political spectrum, released the poll with headlines equivalent to the sinking of the Titanic: “Shock” it trumpeted. Shock? What’s shocking about it except that it once again shows how woefully out of touch the political class is with American society.

Late in the week, Rasmussen released a poll showing that almost 90% of mainstream voters view the political situation in Washington as busted, while 73% of the political class disagree, and therein lies much of the “partisanship” problem that has Evan Bayh wringing his hands and thinking about the tough reelection he was facing before cashing in his chips.

When Ronald Reagan was president I remember listening to some talking head lamenting that Republicans knew how to govern but didn’t know how to rule. Hmm, seems to me that we fought a war about that “ruling” thing a couple hundred years ago. Yet, (my opinion) the guy in the White House and the majority in Congress still can’t understand the difference between governing and ruling, given the way they act about legislation. When every poll tells them that they've lost their constituents and yet they're still trying to ram through unpopular command-and-control healthcare and resorting to procedural trickery like reconciliation to subvert the will of the voters, they've gone to ruling, not governing. And Americans don’t want to be ruled.

What I believe we’re seeing is not the dysfunctional partisanship that Evan Bayh bemoans but rather a fundamental difference in the proper role of government. As pollster Scott Rasmussen himself has said: “the gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and the politicians who want to rule over them may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century.”