Evan Bayh’s thoroughly dishonest and distasteful swan song as he dashes for the K Street loot is a good reminder of how complicit his party was with the extremism of the Bush years. Bayh moans NOW about partisanship and the resulting gridlock in Washington. But where oh where was gridlock when it could have done us some good? We could have used a little of it to block or modify Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts, to slow his mad dash to war on totally bullshit premises, or to at least make him pay for his conquistador fantasies with the inevitable tax increase now left to future presidents.
Bayh’s close to Republican positions and might well be one if his dad had not been a Democrat. He was all gung-ho for the Iraq war and co-sponsored the congressional joint resolution authorizing it. His wife is a professional corporate director, and the companies she represents are directly affected by her hubby’s votes on key committees. But Bayh pretended there was never any pillow talk about her businesses and therefore no conflict of interest—the very idea!
One terrifying thought: Bayh almost became Obama’s running mate in 2008, which would have enabled us to throw up our hands a year early.
It’s intellectually bankrupt and opportunistic to denounce partisanship and play the reasonable centrist when the subversive heel-digging and obstructionism is coming from one easily identifiable side. If Bayh and his Blue Dog cousins really cared about dysfunction in Washington, they would use their positions to remind the true extremists that the majority of citizens expressed themselves quite clearly a year ago and have yet to see any of the things they voted for become reality. Bayh laments the collapse of the cozily conservative consensus he was fully part of for a decade but doesn’t give two hoots for the failure of our democracy to reflect the popular will.
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