I’ll be glad to see Evan Bayh go because he’s basically a moron. His political worldview is so lazy and conventional that he spews nonsense like this:
Q: What is the state of your political party?
A: It’s momentarily very strong. It’s not common for a party to control the White House and both Houses of Congress. But I think that the election this November is going to be a very difficult one for the Democratic Party. I think the Republicans are going to score big gains. And it’s largely because we’ve lost the independents, and that’s largely over deficit and debt.
And so there’s a natural tendency for any group, when they’re riding high, to overreach and I think the most progressive elements in the Democratic Party have and are about to be rebuked by the public.And the irony of that is the cause that gets hurt the most when the liberals overreach is the liberal agenda, because they play into the hands of the conservative Republicans. And it’s an unfortunate fact, but it is a fact. The last election, the base of the Republican Party is just bigger than the base of the Democratic Party by about 10 percent.
The only way progressive Democrats have a role in governing in this country is if they make common cause [with] moderates — otherwise, numerically, it’s just not going to work out. They have not embraced that perspective.
Part of this I agree with, unfortunately. The Republican base probably is a bit larger than the Democratic base. And the public really is mad about deficits and the debt. But Bayh says the Democrats are going to be rebuked for liberal overreach and for creating new debt. That’s the most simplistic nonsense. All we have to do is imagine what the economy would look like if the Democrats hadn’t injected nearly a trillion dollars of stimulus into it, bailed out the auto industry, and stabilized the financial market and sector. In other words, if we hadn’t increased the debt, we’d really be in a world of hurt. So, we aren’t going to get punished for doing something necessary, we’re going to get punished because jackasses like Evan Bayh refuse to explain how the Republicans created this mess and what we’ve done to clean it up. You can blame the media or the Democrats or the president or the opposition, but the problem is a failure of communication and not some kind of liberal overreach.
It’s pretty obvious that liberals have not gotten what they advocated on a whole host of subjects, from the size of the stimulus, to the public option, to the shape of the Wall Street reforms, to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and DOMA, to the closure of Guantanamo, to the policy on Afghanistan. It’s hard to argue that the Democrats would be worse off with lower unemployment, a more popular health care bill, and stronger Wall Street regulation.
I can’t really think of any area where the Democrats have fully embraced the liberal position, let alone pushed it at the expense of the moderate wing of the party.
Think about the next part:
Q: What is it like to be a moderate in the Senate? And what role do they play in politics?
A: The moderates are the key to getting anything done, because most of the time in the Senate you need 60 votes. We’re in a rare moment now where the Democratic Party has close to 60 votes. But usually it’s far short of that and so you have to get four or five or six members of the other party to agree to get anything done.
This is precisely right. And what does that mean? It means that everything we’ve done for the last year and nine months has had to pass Evan Bayh’s sniff-test and (for all but three months of that time) the sniff-test of at least one Republican. And what does that mean? It means that Evan Bayh considers himself guilty of liberal overreach.
Or, it means he’s a dunderhead.
