David Hoppe

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:: With friends like Evan Bayh…

Obama needs us

By David Hoppe

A few weeks ago I wrote in this column about how Barack Obama’s presidency might turn out to have more in common with Harold Washington’s first term as mayor of Chicago than with another of Obama’s role models, Abraham Lincoln. Washington, a reformer who ran against business-as-usual in a city controlled by a powerful political machine, was whip-sawed by members of his own party who wanted to keep the perks and the power for themselves. They tried to destroy Harold Washington, but, in doing so, they almost destroyed the city of Chicago. Washington prevailed by going over the heads of the politicians and making his case directly to the people.

Obama’s been in office for all of about 60 days and, sure enough, members of his own party have started making mischief. Their leader? None other than our own Evan Bayh.

Bayh announced last week that he was forming a “working group” of what he called “centrist” Democrats. Their purpose, said Bayh, was to try and avoid having pieces of legislation that Obama considers important simply handed down to them.

They want, in other words, to make life even tougher for the president than it is already.

Bayh calls this group of senators the “Practicality Caucus.” That’s an unctuously Hoosier way of describing a group that is likely to feel that Obama’s interlocking plan to revive the economy by fixing healthcare, reforming our educational system and reviving manufacturing through the creation of a green workforce is, well, impractical.

And so Bayh has managed to round up about 15 Democratic senators to act as a speed bump for the president’s agenda at the very moment that most people in America believe that Obama can’t move quickly enough to get the country back on track.

Practicality Caucus? You might as well call it Torpedo Alley.

Bayh’s exercise in social networking shows the fragility of the supposedly formidable Democratic majority in the Senate. Ever since election night, pundits have obsessed over whether the Dems would have 58, 59 or 60 Senate votes – 60 being the number that would preclude Republican filibusters capable of gumming up the legislative process. But where Republicans are notorious for their strict party discipline (see: St. Richard Lugar), making nonconformists pay dearly for deviations from the path of corporate bounty, many Democrats are really moderate Republicans by another name. They won their seats by appealing to Republican majorities in their states. It’s more apt to call them Republicrats.

Evan Bayh is a Republicrat. Where his dad, Birch, was a salt-of-the-earth liberal, with a reputation for standing up for the underdog and demanding a fair deal for blue collar Hoosiers, Evan has acted more like an aristo, believing with his Republican colleagues that economic growth begins at the top, instead of the other way around.

But Bayh has also been canny enough to season his style with the kind of red meat populist rhetoric that he knows plays well in this demagogue-prone state. In his first run for governor, he tarred John Mutz as a tax-and-spender because Mutz supported his boss, Bob Orr’s, tax increase for public education. Bayh bragged about creating a state budget surplus. But his black ink came through tax cuts that shrank Indiana state government while doing nothing to improve its efficiency or quality of services. Look where Indiana ranks in national surveys measuring everything from the quality of our air and water to nursing home care: Bayh’s version of fiscal responsibility came at a long-term cost.

Like David Brooks, the conservative pundit who addressed the Kelley School of Business annual conference in Indianapolis a couple of weeks ago, Bayh is loaded with droopy-dog concern about Obama’s ambitious agenda. He fears Obama is trying to do too much, too soon. This from a man who represents a state with a gutted manufacturing base, cities and towns awash in red ink and a busted unemployment insurance program.

We can only wonder what, exactly, Bayh hopes his Practicality Caucus will accomplish. Perhaps it will manage to protect big insurance and pharmaceutical companies from having to respond to healthcare reform. Or preserve coal companies as our energy providers of choice. Maybe it will succeed at prolonging our economic misery long enough to convince us that Obama’s promise of change is impossible after all.

Last week, Pres. Obama traveled to southern California for another of his town hall meetings. For over an hour he took unscripted questions from people in a community with one of the highest rates of foreclosure in the land.

And, for over an hour, Pres. Obama did something I haven’t seen a politician do in 50 years. He spoke to the citizens there with the understanding that they were intelligent and, given the chance, as capable of coming to grips with this maddeningly complicated crisis as he is. He treated them like the adults they are.
Obama trusts those people – and people like us – to help him fix what’s broken about this country. It’s a gamble, but it’s practicality worth believing in.
To contact Evan Bayh, go to http://bayh.senate.gov/contact/ or call (202) 224-5623.