Evan Bayh’s cowardly acts
In “noble resignation” mode the past week, Evan Bayh has been acting like he’s one of the only sane voices in the Senate and wants more than anything for small-minded legislative gridlock to end.
But for once I find myself in agreement with Ross Douthat (who agrees with Michael Tomasky) that Bayh did very little to argue for progress or principles of any sort while in the Senate, effectively working instead to maintain unacceptable status quos.
Take Bayh’s role in healthcare reform, for example. While not as destructive as a few other Democrats, he was mostly a white-bread bystander, going on talk shows to take mild positions that required no courage or leadership. He routinely towed the “bipartisanship above all else” line, which only helped buoy an obstructionist Republican minority with no constructive ideas, and even suggested that he might oppose reform altogether. He didn’t put any notable pressure on more obstructive “moderate Democrats” to get on board with reasonable legislation, and when reform stalled indefinitely due to the gutless and selfish demands of these “moderates” — which led to the angry election of Mr. Obstruction, Scott Brown, in Massachusetts — Bayh cowardly, destructively, and delusionally blamed “the left.” A naked attempt to realign himself with what he saw as changing political winds, he was dead wrong on the facts: the public has always been for healthcare reform that does much more to put health above insurance industry profits — i.e., that goes much further to “the left.”
[Note: We can only speculate as to why Bayh went this route on healthcare, or whether it constituted any kind of coherent strategy one way or another. But any examination should include the fact that his wife sits on the board of Wellpoint, one of the largest insurance companies in America and an outspoken corporate opponent of reform that would threaten their profits.]
Many news articles covering the resignation have spouted as accepted wisdom that Bayh has been a visionary prophet who warned other Democrats about trying to do much too quickly over the last year. But this warning was complete garbage a year ago, when voters expressed clear support for the new president’s agenda, and it’s complete garbage today, when voters are obviously seeking more change instead of less (not to mention that more progressive change is ethically defensible). The reality is that Bayh made his predictions and then helped bring them about as a prominent but deluded legislator and pundit. The spur-of-the-moment nature and timing of his resignation is the latest example of Bayh creating needless headaches for his colleagues and undermining his own professed desire to see legislative progress.
So for Evan Bayh to be piling blame anywhere but at home is both intellectually dishonest and dishonorable. His “noble resignation” (á la Sarah Palin) from the Senate is just another cowardly act painted pretty for the cameras.
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