The Emptiness of Evan BayhRoss Douthat
February 16, 2010, 3:33 pm
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The Emptiness of Evan Bayh
Before he decided not to run for re-election, Evan Bayh was an unpopular figure in the liberal blogosphere. Now he’s straightforwardly reviled. Normally, this would incline me to find something positive to say about him, but after meditating on the Bayh record, such as it was, I find myself basically agreeing with Michael Tomasky:
It doesn’t bother me that he was a moderate. The party needs moderates.
But even on his own terms as a moderate, he didn’t lead on anything that I’m aware of. He talked a lot about the deficit, but I’m unaware of any genuine policy impact he might have had.
Last year he formed a moderate coalition of some sort in the Senate that he led. It seems to have done nothing. I’m sure it did some things. But it strikes me that if it had done anything important, anything that actually shaped the debate, I’d know about it, and I don’t.
And yet: the Washington media always hyped the guy. Moderate, midwestern, handsome in an anodyne way, well-spoken if you consider the ability to articulate obvious conventional wisdom a virtue.
But there was less there than met the eye. And now perhaps we see, in the way he handled this decision, one reason why.
This is harsh but ultimately fair. America needs politicians who stake out interesting, politically-courageous positions on important policy questions. What it doesn’t need is politicians who occupy the safest possible ground on the great issues of the day, shift slightly left or slightly right depending on the state of public opinion, and then get congratulated by the press for being so independent-minded.
Bayh wasn’t as bad, in this regard, as someone like Arlen Specter, but he wasn’t much good, either. His big issue was supposed to be deficit reduction, but you wouldn’t catch him dead proposing anything remotely like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, with its detailed list of programs to be reshaped and reduced. (Bayh preferred the “bravery” of punting the issue to a commission.) On foreign policy, he was a liberal hawk on every vote except the hard ones: He backed the Iraq invasion in 2003 and takes a hard line on Iran today, but in the debate over the surge, when being hawkish was suddenly costly, he sided with the doves. Wherever the Beltway conventional wisdom settled, there was Evan Bayh — and he was rewarded for it with endless presidential and vice-presidential chatter, which has followed him, absurdly, even now that he’s announced his retirement.
In his farewell statement, Bayh complained that in today’s Washington, there’s “too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.” He’s right, up to a point, but his own record suggests that centrists as well as ideologues can be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
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Link:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/the-emptiness-of-evan-bayh/:shrug:
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