WASHINGTON – If your not-so-wonderful job is a stepping stone to your ideal career, you put up with it because it’ll get you where you really want to be. If your ho-hum occupation is the only way you have to support a family, you suck it up and look for fulfillment elsewhere.
But if your sought-after career is not going to happen in the foreseeable future, and if you have other resources or talents – why hang around in a job you find dissatisfying and even distasteful?
Hoosiers, meet Evan Bayh, disgruntled employee. You might have thought he’s been your senator for the past 11 years. But it’s only been in the past 12 months that he’s truly been in Congress.
For the first decade of his congressional career, Bayh had a different ambition: running for president or angling to be vice president.
When the air leaked out of those goals, Bayh had to confront the reality of succeeding in a legislative body and the rampant hostility aimed at him from liberal activists and bloggers. He spent a year doing that, growing more and more miserable.
As he said: “I am an executive at heart,” and “I don’t love Congress.”
Bayh has made that clear by not developing an issue he feels passionate about and then working the system to bring it to fruition. He has popped up on issues such as flu vaccines or Iran sanctions – headline-producing matters – but has never done the gritty legislative work that would advance his cause.
Bayh’s retirement-announcement gripes about the hyperpartisanship that blocks compromise and progress seemed disingenuous to many people because they couldn’t believe he was only now noticing that an institution based on politics is political and often where ideology trumps policy.
They were convinced that Bayh must have seen a poll that predicted he’d lose, or that there was a scandal a-brewing, or that the appearance of Dan Coats on the scene freaked him out, or that he or his wife has a life-threatening illness, or that he and Hillary Clinton are secretly plotting to run against President Obama in 2012.
As juicy as those theories are, my guess is that Bayh’s primary reason for leaving Congress after two terms is that he doesn’t much like the job and that it’s not getting him to the White House. Leaving Democrats in the lurch by turning a safe seat into an iffy one wasn’t compelling enough to make him rethink his departure.
As with any huge life decision, surely there were other contributing factors, none of which would have brought him to this decision if he actually liked being a senator.
Certainly Bayh was not looking forward to defending his wife’s role on corporate boards whose industries have business before Congress. As a sane person, he wasn’t relishing an invective-laced political campaign, though with $13 million to conduct it, he wasn’t quaking in fear.
Maybe he’s sick of hobbling around on a bum foot that would only get worse during the physical rigors of a campaign. Perhaps he feels the loss of a longtime aide who was widely viewed as the genesis whenever there was any passion to Bayh’s legislative work; Tom Sugar took another job last summer.
And maybe Bayh, not known for his wide friendship circle, looked around the Senate and saw loneliness. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, in many ways very similar to Bayh, stands a strong chance of losing re-election this year; other political (and temperamentally) moderates are few in number.
Some Democrats were stunned by his decision but could have understood it better except for the timing. They said it didn’t give Democrats much of a chance to decide to run. Republicans accused Bayh of the same hyperpartisanship he decried, going so far as to suggest – as the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee did – that Indiana should break its election laws so Democratic primary candidates could come forward.
Bayh said he reached a decision three days before he announced it. On the one hand, this is believable. After all, it’s exactly what he did in 2006. After running full-bore for the Democratic presidential nomination for years, raising money and traveling the country, he pulled the plug just two weeks after forming an exploratory committee.
On the other hand, Bayh may have known quite some time ago what he planned to do but chose to wait until it was too late for anyone else to get into the primary. Not a Democratic somebody else, but Gov. Mitch Daniels on the Republican side.
It’s too late for this, but let me tell you what I wish Bayh had done as he noticed his growing disenchantment.
I wish he had recognized a couple of years ago that, as he said in his retirement speech, in Congress there is “too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.”
I wish he had put his considerable talents to working on reducing that – not by complaining that political creatures are political, but by trying to tamp down the hostile environment we – that’s all of us – are allowing to permeate society. Politicians, after all, respond to their constituents, and these days voters say they want Washington to ungridlock itself, but they reward fire-breathers who will do no such thing.
I wish Bayh had, for instance, put a lot of energy into going into high school classes and talking about political civility. I wish he had used some of that $13 million campaign fund to work on a project with Indiana University’s Center on Congress to encourage productive political dialogue.
I wish he had met with and listened to the grumbling groups, who instead of finding an open door found Bayh’s phones unanswered – and called me to complain about it.
I wish he had scheduled town meeting after town meeting last summer and provided a steam valve for the anger born of economic insecurity that is fueling so many people.
In doing all this, Bayh might have jeopardized his political career. But that’s been jettisoned anyway. At least we might have gotten something for it.
