As my colleague T-N Coates has pointed out, Evan Bayh's very-last-minute decision not to run for the Senate is graceless by most normal measures. He didn't talk with the President or the leader of his party in the Senate, both of whom obviously had a stake in his decision. He caught his state's party organization so much by surprise that they may not be able to get a substitute on the ballot under the normal rules.Personally, I'm betting that something more will soon come out that helps explain this 'graceless' act. It's unlikely to have been such a spontaneous decision, with so much at stake.
The puzzlement to me is how this fits with the previous 25 years of his political life -- rather, what retrospective light it sheds on that time. Bayh has held elective office since he was 30. He became Indiana's governor at 33 and U.S. senator at 43.
If he really cared about his Indiana constituents and their problems through that time, great! But if so, how can he walk away with this kind of careless disregard about whether, in the style of his departure, he is smashing up things that had said were important to him. If, on the other hand, these issues and people never really mattered that much, and public life had been a kind of popularity contest -- well, that may be true of a lot of politicians, but they don't like to reveal it quite this bluntly.
In the meantime, it would seem that if what you really want to do is represent corporations, like Bayh does, why not be a CEO or a lobbyist? They don't have to hide their representation and they make WAY more money than Senators.
Happy money making, Senator!
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