Bayh Warns "Catastrophe" If Dems Ignore Massachusetts Senate Race Lessons
(ABC News) - Even before the votes are counted, Senator Evan Bayh is warning fellow Democrats that ignoring the lessons of the Massachusetts Senate race will “lead to even further catastrophe” for their party.
“There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this,” Bayh told ABC News, but “if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”
What is the lesson of Massachusetts – where Democrats face the prospects of losing a Senate seat they’ve held since 1952? For Senator Bayh the lesson is that the party pushed an agenda that is too far to the left, alienating moderate and independent voters.
“There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this,” Bayh told ABC News, but “if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”
What is the lesson of Massachusetts – where Democrats face the prospects of losing a Senate seat they’ve held since 1952? For Senator Bayh the lesson is that the party pushed an agenda that is too far to the left, alienating moderate and independent voters.
posted by BP News Bureau | 12:48 PM
1 Comments:
(Hot Air) - That is as clear a shot across the bow for Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama as we’re likely to see in a Senate race — and an indication of where the Obama agenda is headed in a Senate with 41 Republicans. Bayh has warned repeatedly over the past year about overreach and a leftward tilt in Congress, although thus far he hasn’t put his votes where his mouth has been. He went along on ObamaCare after the public option got stripped out of the final Harry Reid version, and didn’t even get a deal like Ben Nelson wangled for Nebraska.
Bayh sounds as though he’s heading off the reservation in the wake of the Democratic fiasco in Massachusetts, but sounds won’t be enough for Indiana voters. Bayh will have to follow through on his long-held threat to form a moderate coalition to block Reid’s agenda, similar to what John McCain did to George Bush’s judiciary nominees in 2005. Even that may not help Bayh at this point; a gallows conversion rarely impresses anyone, and that’s exactly what it will resemble.
That doesn’t make Bayh’s advice to Democrats any less valuable. They seem convinced that the only way to rescue themselves from the trap in which they have caught themselves is to chew off the foot that’s still free. If they double down on their hard-Left agenda, nothing Bayh does will save him in Indiana, and leftists like Barbara Boxer may discover that they’re not immune to the anger that this Congress has generated, either.
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