Legal Commentary

The Bygone Days: When Ideas Did Not Matter

By Big Tent Democrat

Evan Bayh bylines an insipid NYTimes Op-Ed that bemoans the alleged rise of "partisanship" in the Congress. (Jefferson and Adams would likely be surprised that party politics is of recent vintage.) The funniest part of the piece to me was this anecdote:

While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father’s time. My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats. One incident from his career vividly demonstrates how times have changed. In 1968, when my father was running for re-election, Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, approached him on the Senate floor, put his arm around my dad’s shoulder, and asked what he could do to help. This is unimaginable today.

(Emphasis supplied.) Bayh does not report what his father's answer was to Dirksen but the obvious one would be this - don't run a Republican candidate against me. It is truly ridiculous. More . . .

Presumably Dirksen and Birch Bayh had different views on issues and the Republican candidate who ran against Bayh would have more closely reflected the view of Dirksen than Birch Bayh did. This fundamental conceit of Bayh's that ideas and policies do not matter is precisely why he was such a useless and ineffectual stateman. He never grasped that elections are where competing ideas and policies are presented to the electorate who then choose what direction they prefer for the country. It need not be rancorous (of course it will be) but the competition of ideas is the thing. It seems clear to me that Bayh implicitly abhors democracy. It reaffirms my view that Bayh's departure is not an meaningful event.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 21, 2010 (boomark / email).