Some are saying Sen. Evan Bayh dropped his bombshell on Monday because he feared he’d be trounced in the November election.
Maybe so.
But if that’s true, the two-term Hoosier Democrat had tea leaves that saw things far differently than most political analysts. As of Monday, Bayh had a huge lead over the leading Republican challengers in the polls. And he already had $13 million in his campaign war chest.
There are those who saw the Republican upset in Massachusetts and concluded that 2010 was likely to be a bad year for Democrats. After all, if the party can’t hang onto Edward Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate, what seat can it keep?
Certainly, the polls might have grown tighter as November moved closer, and it’s entirely possible Bayh would have been faced with the race of his life.
Anything’s possible in politics. Few, after all, would have predicted that Bayh’s father, Birch, would have been run out of office by an upstart named Dan Quayle.
But what if Bayh made his decision for exactly the reason he cited? What if the political moderate gave up a 24-year career in public service because he found too few colleagues willing to look for middle ground?
“There’s just too much brain-dead partisanship,” Bayh said in a nationally broadcast interview.
He complained that too few individuals in either party seemed willing to reach across the aisle in the spirit of compromise. Partisanship and gridlock, he said, had simply made the job too frustrating.
The general public would seem to share that frustration.
An Associated Press-GfK poll last month found just 32 percent of respondents approving of how Congress was handling its job. People were split about evenly over whether they wanted their own members of Congress to be re-elected.
A CBS News/New York Times poll early this month found 81 percent saying it’s time to elect new people to Congress. Just 8 percent said most members deserve re-election.
Some have suggested that voters across the country are fed up with Democrats, but others have said they’re simply tired of politics as usual.
Bayh suggested on Monday that voters could deliver “a shock” to Congress by voting lots of incumbents out of office.
Maybe that’s just the sort of shock Washington needs.
