Bayh's additional gift to the GOP
Posted: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 11:57 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under: Congress, Democrats, Republicans
From NBC's Luke Russert
The GOP message machine is aggressively sending around this quote from outgoing Sen. Evan Bayh (D) from an interview he did on CBS this morning:
[I]f I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.
Tomorrow just happens to be the one-year anniversary of the stimulus being signed into law, so expect the GOP to play up this quote.
Not His Fathers Son
Steve Kornacki ,Salon
Funny that he mentioned jobs. After all, it was Bayh and fellow moderate Senate Democrats who insisted last year that President Obama's first major initiative as president -- the stimulus bill -- be pared by about $100 billion, depriving the economy of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Not that it mattered much to Bayh, who showed far more concern last year in the GOP's new pet issue: government spending and the federal deficit.
This has always been Bayh's way -- to position himself as every Republican's favorite Democrat.
John Nichols, The Nation:
In The Nations "2010ElectionPrimer",
As an example of the sort of senator that progressives ought not worry about losing, I cited Bayh, a longtime leader of the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, which has for the better part of a quarter century worked to turn the Democratic Party into a kinder, gentler version of the GOP.
"Don't fret too much about the fate of Southern and border-state compromisers (Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln, Indiana's Evan Bayh)," the primer suggested. "Worry about re-electing progressives like California's Barbara Boxer and Wisconsin's Russ Feingold. Think about helping progressive, or at least mainstream, Democrats win seats vacated by GOP incumbents in Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio. The point is not merely to elect Democrats but to forge a caucus that is less tied to the old ways of doing things and more inclined to scrap antidemocratic Senate rules and start governing."
