The rumor mill is abuzz with the latest possible running mate for the Audacity of Hype, neighboring Senator Evan Bayh (New York Sun). It makes a lot of sense. Bayh backed Hillary Clinton; he helps even further with a normally Republican state knocked into play by the fact that a neighbor is the Presidential nominee; and he has a reputation as a moderate Democrat.
Trouble is, there isn’t much to that reputation, as the Sun’s editors noted:
Well, as admirers of the DLC wing of the Democratic Party, count us as among those disappointed by Mr. Bayh, who has lurched to the left in an effort to make himself palatable to the party’s base of hard-left activists and special interest groups. He voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, earning a stunning rebuke from the editorialists of the Indianapolis Star, which called the position “pure political posturing” and wrote, “Bayh went to Washington talking about Hoosier values. He clearly lost them along the way.”
Mr. Bayh has also lost his bearings in pursued of the left wing of organized labor. National Journal reported on a 2006 speech he gave to an AFL-CIO group in which he “sounded at times like a New Deal liberal,” saying “he supported a host of expensive initiatives including ‘prevailing wages’ for construction projects and a ‘jobs program’ that he justified by saying that if the country could spend billions on Iraq, it could spend billions for the ‘reconstruction and future of the United States of America.’”
. . .
On January 22, 2004, he voted against school vouchers in Washington, D.C., a bill that more reasonable Democrats such as Senators Feinstein and Schumer supported. He filibustered to block a vote on confirming John Bolton as the Bush administration’s ambassador at the United Nations.
If this is what passes for a bipartisan centrist in today’s Democratic Party, someone who opposed John Roberts and John Bolton, opposed vouchers to rescue minority children from the District of Columbia’s failing schools, opposes, in the midst of an energy price crisis, drilling for oil in the speck of Alaska known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — well, it’s pretty thin gruel. If this is centrism, where’s the margin?
Geez, when this is the competition, the Tim Kaine boomlet becomes a lot more understandable!
