Is Evan Bayh Planning a Revolt of the Center?

At first glance Senator Evan Bayh’s announcement not to seek reelection to the US Senate seems almost routine.  He appears as one in a long line of Senators who have quit Washington frustrated by the partisanship and  gridlock.  But look deeper, and centrist Bayh’s departure may actually be a  shot across the bow of the entire Democrat political establishment.  Or, more dramatically, perhaps Bayh is aiming right at the bridge from where the ship of state is steered.  Consider the following.

At the Press Conference announcing his retirement from the US Senate, Evan Bayh declared in a prepared statement:

After all these years, my passion for service to our fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned.

And:

I am an executive at heart. I value my independence. I am not motivated by strident partisanship or ideology.

“Executive?”  What might we infer from this?

The NY Post concludes that Bayh is planning to run for President as an Independent.

A columnist for The Huffington Post says the same thing.

That he took no questions at his news conference suggests that Bayh is keenly focused on the political message he is trying to send.  This kind of control is more customary for a candidate than someone retiring from public life.

Here in an interview at MSNBC Bayh made one of several Shermanesque statements declaring that he will not be running for President under any circumstances.  But William Tecumseh Sherman is so 19th Century, a time when words were less flexible than they are today.

Bayh is careful not to criticize the President too harshly, but he is not reticent about condemning Congress.  “If I could create one job in the private sector,” said Bayh, “that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”  He described Republican Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts as a possible “ultimate cure” in which ” the vast majority of moderates and independents rose up and said enough already.”

Bayh was not content to give his news conference and head off to the golf course.  He made the rounds to about every television show that would have him.    Here he is on The View and Charlie Rose.

On February 20 he published “Why I am Leaving the Senate” in the New York Times.   The piece (Read it here)  is more than an explanation of Bayh’s decision to leave the Senate; it is also a “manifesto of the center,” and a very good one at that.  In it Bayh not only emphasizes the need for the two parties to work together to solve pressing national problems, but he also stresses the need for various reforms necessary to change the perverse incentives that corrupt our political system.

Equally intriguing is the piece, “Goodbye to All That,” written by moderate Republican and former Senator Lincoln Chafee, and published right alongside Bayh’s article.  Chafee’s words are worth quoting at length:

So I can certainly understand Senator Bayh’s remarkable decision to leave, but I also suspect that he’s not willing to give up on Washington. When he suggested recently that a third party could be a viable contender for the White House in 2012, my first thought was that he was focused on a future as an independent — and the exciting new avenues for public service it offers.

In 2001, John Zogby, the pollster, told our Republican caucus, “There is a burgeoning centrist third party waiting to be formed.” Either party could make a strategic decision to capture the center, he said, or both could wait for a third party to fill the vacuum.

Barack Obama stood in as a kind of third-party candidate in 2008, with an attractive message of hope, change and a post-partisan approach. He captured that popular, centrist energy for the Democrats.

So far, I’m sorry to say, he’s proving my assertion that Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all. His difficult first year in office can be traced, I believe, to his appointment of the hyperpartisan Rahm Emanuel as the White House chief of staff, and his failure to devise a stimulus bill that could win a single Republican vote in the House. That crucial first test set the tone for the stalemate on health care reform — an issue that should be popular with the American center, and could be, given the right leadership.

With our hopes for a post-partisan era still unmet, I say to Senator Bayh: Welcome to the club of independents who are looking for a better way to serve. Before long, we centrists may even come together to define the third party that Mr. Zogby foresaw in 2001. (Read Chafee’s entire article here.)

Surely the publication of Chafee’s op/ed with Bayh’s is no accident.  It appears that Evan Bayh is – to mix earth and water metaphors – laying the groundwork and testing the waters.  If the Democrats keep to their big government jihad, and the Republicans nominate a bomb-throwing conservative for President, there will be plenty of room in the center for a reformer with common sense.  Then enter Evan Bayh.