Evan Bayh – The Politician – Will Now Fade Away

In the movie Patton there was a German intelligence officer named Captain Oskar Steiger who was charged with profiling General George S. Patton for his superiors in the Wehrmacht. These generals were trying to ascertain the character of Old Blood and Guts by mixing a batch of history and psychology.

I was a Steiger of sorts as a staffer on Senator Dan Quayle’s 1986 Senate campaign where I spent some of the slower days in early 1985 reading hundreds of news clippings from the 1980 campaign when Congressman Dan Quayle beat three term Senator Birch Bayh. My goal was to get a handle on different Indiana political personalities, issues, and any campaign related items that might carry over to a statewide run six years later.

• NOTE TO YOUNGER READERS: News clippings in 1980 were made of p-a-p-e-r. They were not blogs or tweets. Many were yellow and crunchy. Some were g-l-u-e-d to other pieces of paper so they would not disintegrate.

While at Hillsdale College in 1980, I wasn’t as aware of the Quayle upset as I should have been (no talk radio, no Internet, no digital frenzy, instead peace and quiet, I think I miss it). So while waiting for the Pony Express to deliver political news from my parents in South Bend, I figured that the elder Bayh was knocked off by a hard charging young politician from the Goldwater wing of the GOP (and who wasn’t a member of the Trilateral Commission) riding the Reagan wave that washed away several old bull liberal Senators and delivering the upper chamber to Republicans for the first time since 1955.

However poring through the clippings, I saw a thread that altered slightly my original beer kegger induced analysis of that race.

While the conservative era was starting to get its sea legs, I sensed that maybe Birch Bayh’s heart was not in the race. His wife Marvella had died in 1979 after suffering several years from cancer. Evan Bayh was 24 at the time and his father’s campaign manager.

I can’t speak first hand of a parent or spousal death, but I do know some people who have. You don’t shake those events off after six months.  Those awful moments are with you for a lifetime. I can’t imagine how father and son could have focused on Dan Quayle all that well so soon after her death. Marvella was a force that no doubt kept family and politics humming together. Not to take anything away from Quayle, but Birch and Evan must have lost their bearings for a time. (By the way, the similarities between Marvella Bayh and Susan Bayh are startling).

In the pile of clippings, I saw a picture of Evan Bayh with hair down to his shoulders. It was a strange picture. He didn’t look like a hippie; instead he looked like he did at his retirement news conference but with longer hair. It’s as if even then he was trying to be all things to all people. Did he want to be a 1968 Chicago rebel or part of the Washington establishment? Did he struggle back then with who he was, causing him to straddle the center looking for popularity and approval?

I also wonder if during that 1980 campaign, Evan saw for the first time the fierceness of the conservative grassroots networks and how they could swarm around a liberal and dissolve a politician.  Did he decide then that he was never going to poke a stick in that bee hive and thus he turned away from movement liberals — the future readers of The Huffington Post and the Daily Kos?

While Senator Quayle was running for a second term in 1986, Evan Bayh was running for his first elected office, Secretary of State. Did he really want to be a politician? After having spent so much time visiting all 92 counties, I had a pretty good handle on Indiana politicians and Bayh looked out of place. He didn’t seem to have that Hoosier feel that his father had. He was St. Albans not Shirkieville, Indiana — his birthplace.

Has he ever felt some reluctance with continuing the family business? Has he always scared off better Republicans (and Democrats) thanks to his last name and, at least early on, the fundraising networks he inherited from Birch Bayh assuring a healthy cash on hand that always made opponents nervous?  Did he jump into the arena to avenge his father’s defeat not unlike George W. Bush did by running for governor of Texas? I’ve read that if John Kennedy did not have such a maniacal dad who wanted his sons to become Lords of the Universe that he might have been satisfied as a journalist or historian.

Do the sons really want to follow in their fathers’ footsteps?

I’m not suggesting that Evan regrets his political life, not for a minute, but is he going to answer again that nagging question that we all have, “What am I going to do when I grow up?”

Senator Evan Bayh has decided that he isn’t going to have his sons go through another day where dad has to stick around Capitol Hill to tend to mindless quorum calls and hopping on jets to raise campaign funds in Indiana and California.

Plus you never know when God will make that final phone call, so better to spend more time with Susan and the kids. He understands the fragile moments of life.

As for his presidential ambitions, those ships have sailed away.  He has failed as a candidate on the national stage and the party lefties, the primary voters, can’t stand him. They deny that he is a Democrat. It would be foolhardy to take on a popular President Obama.  Even if Obama’s presidency continues its downward spiral, does he really want to take the nomination away from a sitting President?  It would only cause civil war in the party and further cement his defeat in November against a united GOP (and by God we are going to be united). Such a nomination win would be a Pyrrhic victory.

Plus politicians who form third parties or challenge within their own party are ones with names like Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan — large charismatic forces of life that are movement politicians. (And even they lost). Evan Bayh can’t emulate that force of nature. He doesn’t have a body of work or thought that historians will want to debate for decades to come. He is a cautious technocrat.  He’s Al Gore’s little brother, but not as bombastic. The chemistry is simply not there to move We the People.

I was a rare conservative who never foamed at the mouth at the mention of his name which is probably another reason why the Left did not like him. Maybe as a young 24 year old, I understood him while reading those clippings and those impressions have lasted all these years.

Here’s to a happy life for Evan Bayh and family and a tip of the hat to Captain Steiger.