By Brian Howey

KOKOMO – Dan Coats came of age politically when he emerged from Dan Quayle’s shadow during the thrust of the Reagan Revolution. He is the only Hoosier not named “Lugar” or “Bayh” to hold a U.S. Senate seat since 1977. He is undefeated. He has been married only once.

 And he surprised just about everyone when he reemerged as a candidate on Ground Hog’s Day – 12 years after having last held elective office and 18 years since he was last on a ballot. He had decided to take on U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh after the Republican field failed to raise money and Coats was alarmed at the direction of the country under President Obama. When the news got out, former Sen. Phil Gramm dialed him up to inquire how his “second marriage” was faring. It was a joke, of course, Marcia Coats had fully signed off on his return to senatorial politics.

 In late 1998, Coats stopped by for a final chat. After eight years in the House and 10 years in the Senate, he wanted to move on. He was tired on the constant need to raise money and the nastiness of the process that was careening toward impeachment of President Clinton. And there was the senator’s son – Evan Bayh – waiting in the wings to reclaim his father’s Senate seat.

 

After our conversaton, Coats walked out the door, only to return. “I could have beat Evan Bayh,” he said before walking away. Was this to be “unfinished business,” Coats acknowledged, “To be candid with you, a little bit.”

 ”I had committed to term limits. I wanted to honor that commitment,” he said. “But I did feel bad that in a sense I opened the door and turned a Republican seat into a Democratic seat.”

 Thirteen days after Coats decided to run, Bayh retired. After an aide called him with the news, Coats was thunderstruck. “I can’t believe it,” he said about 12 seconds later.

 As Coats pondered a return to politics, he was warned that things had changed since he last ran in 1992. “I had former colleagues that called and said, ‘This is an entirely different ball game. You sure you want to do this?’ We went in with eyes wide open.”

 Had the decision come in a normal way with months of planning, Coats would have done things differently. “It was the last thing I was considering,” Coats said. “I would have taken a number of steps earlier if I thought I was getting back in preparation for that. We have this second home in North Carolina and I certainly would have sold that.” Within weeks of his return, Democrats posted a YouTube video of Coats talking about retiring to North Carolina.

 And it has been eye opening. Back in 1992, the Internet was still in diapers. When he left office, newspapers and TV stations were just turning to the Internet. Now there are blogs run by “journalists” without degrees and with agendas.

 ”The most major change is the Internet,” he explained. “The ways and means of communication and the access to information is so extraordinary. There’s no filter. You can take anything you want to say, make any allegation and you can make it anonymously. There’s no editor you can call and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ Or ‘here’s my story.’ “

 Indications of the change came almost immediately. Earlier in the day on Feb. 2, Bayh told a group of visitors in his Senate office that he had to “go deal with a German ambassador.” Howey Politics Indiana broke the news about Coats that night and called Indiana Democratic Chairman Dan Parker for a comment. He responded by reciting Ambassador Coats’ ties to Bank of America as a lobbyist.

“I can tell you the difference between the former campaign (1992) and this one is people like this guy,” Coats said, pointing to Pete Seat, his communications director. “You give him a piece of news, he gets on the Internet and he’s all over it. You type in ‘Lobbying Disclosure Act’ and ‘Coats’ and boom! That information is there. It is revolutionary. So when Parker heard I was doing this, boom, he went to the Internet and I think he had that stuff in an hour.”

 Another sea change is the “I gotcha” dynamic. “It’s not what you stand for, who you are, what you did, or your resume,” Coats said. “It’s we’re going to catch you making a mistake. And we’re going to blast that and that’s going to be our campaign.”

 Any candidate playing at the congressional level has to be aware of the “Macaca” moment, as Sen. George Allen learned in 2006. “Everywhere I go there is a camera on me recording,” Coats said. “It used to be you’d call a press conference, the press would show up and that was your message.

Today it’s what door did you enter? What restaurant did you eat at? I’ve had people outside my house. I’ve had people checking to see when I come home. I’ve had people posing as journalists at a Republican event.”

 The columnist publishes at www.howeypolitics.com.

By Brian Howey

FRANKLIN – Evan Bayh and family spent part of last August floating down the Colorado River deep in the Grand Canyon pondering his future.

 “No television, no cell phones,” Bayh told me. “It was great. Just a time to get away and think about life and the future. This had been on my mind for quite awhile. This had been on my mind since January – not this January but a year ago January.”

 Just as President Obama was taking the oath of office, Bayh was telling Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic Senate Campaign Chairman Bob Mendendez that a reelection bid was “not a foregone conclusion.”

 It had been a whirlwind of two years with his own presidential campaign, the abrupt rise of Barack Obama, and the entrenched Hillary Clinton campaign. Bayh dropped out of the presidential race in December 2006, backed Clinton in the primaries, and after Obama secured the nomination, the junior Hoosier senator streaked atop the veepstakes lists. When the nomination went to Joe Biden, Bayh’s chances of returning to executive governance faded.

 When the senator returned to the Grand Canyon rim, he had decided to end his U.S. Senate career.

 Upon his return to Washington, Bayh was scheduled to meet with President Obama in the Oval Office to talk about the senator’s top priority – deficit and debt reduction. “During that meeting I asked the President if I could have two more minutes of his time,” Bayh said. “This was the first week in September and I told him I had decided that I was not going to run for reelection.”

 Obama was surprised. “He asked me, ‘Are you 100 percent sure?’ and I said, ‘I’m 98 percent sure.’ And that was my mistake.

 “He seized upon that 2 percent over the next – oh, however many months that was until February – I must have talked with him and met with him a number of times. I met with his Chief of Staff (Rahm Emanuel) a number of times. They tried to convince me to seek reelection. I felt like I owed it to him to take that seriously.“

 “It was just a hard decision for me. I love what I’ve done. I love serving the people of Indiana. I just concluded that 12 years in Congress was enough,” Bayh said.

 He had fashioned the classic pros/cons list. But when the President is asking for reconsideration, it changes the dynamic.

 “I felt that with respect to the President I should think about it. It was a difficult decision and, frankly, I procrastinated. I would decide by Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving came and went. I’ll decide by Christmas and then Christmas came and went. Finally it was the deadline that forced me to make the decision and I did. So that’s how it all transpired,” Bayh said. “There was no master plan to time my decision in a way that was going to prevent a Democratic primary. There could be nothing further from the truth.”

 Bayh said that it was the assessment of the Obama team that he had the best chance at reelection. Even with the difficult political environment facing Democrats, Bayh’s pollster was telling him he had “more than a 90 percent chance to win reelection.”

 What it really came down to was where his heart was. “My views are just more moderate than many members of my caucus,” Bayh acknowledged. “That means that on a whole host of things” he was being pressured to fall in line. “Things that if I were calling the shots, we would not be doing. The caucus system really works against independence.”

 Now after two terms as governor, two in the U.S. Senate, Bayh has reached middle age. “I’ll be 55 in December, which I’m still young enough to do other things, including doing more than one thing,” is how he puts it. “I can have a significant impact, whereas if I waited until I was 61 or 67, which isn’t that old, but chances of really being able to fashion a second career are just not as great.”

 There is no doubt that between his time as governor and that in the U.S. Senate, it is the former rather than the latter that brings out the better side in him. As a governor, he says, “I was accustomed in public service to making decisions and taking a more significant role in the decision making process as opposed to be merely one out of 100. So the satisfaction I derived came out of making a bigger impact on people’s lives was simply as an executive.”

 And this is where we stand today: with one affirmative sentence, Evan Bayh – the boss of Indiana Democrats – could alter (and potentially dominate) the 2012 governor’s race.

 The columnist publishes at www.howeypolitics.com

By Brian Howey

INDIANAPOLIS – When compiling my first fall Indiana House Horse Race predictions and then receiving the Rasmussen Reports poll on the U.S. Senate race, the potentially immense impact Evan Bayh’s retirement decision has on the Senate race begins to sink in.

 For Indiana Democrats, it could be a disaster.

 The Rasmussen Reports poll from May 5-6 has Republican Dan Coats leading U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth 51-36 percent. Now, one of my favorite lines has been to not place too much importance on polling in April and May. If we had done so in 1992, we would have expected a President Perot.

 But even at this early date, what is unmistakable is that a once relatively safe U.S. Senate seat in the Democratic column may be slipping away. At the Coats victory party on Election Night, the room seemed flat and uninspired. The Coats candidacy is not a wellspring of grassroots activism and emotion. But many believe the Coats candidacy scared Bayh out of the race.

 Bayh certainly would have had an intense reelection battle and I suspect he was looking at internal numbers showing that his landslide days have abated. But even in an environment hostile to incumbents, and considering the history of one-time presidential candidates coming home and losing, Bayh probably was looking at a victory in the 5 to 7 percent range instead of his customary 25 percent. Ellsworth has had to put a campaign together on the fly and many are openly wondering about its outreach to African-Americans, Latinos, labor and the news media. It hasn’t been pretty.

 Whatever Bayh saw, the fact is that he has left his party in dire straits.

 Ellsworth’s 8th CD certainly would have been in play in the fall. But as part of the Bayh retirement dominoes, it also is on the endangered list for Democrats. HPI probably would have had the race in a “Leans” Ellsworth category until Dr. Larry Bucshon could demonstrate that he could match his establishment support and pick up that of the Kristi Risk Tea Party wing. I rate it as a “Tossup.”

Bucshon could be one of the few new faces the Tea Party has been seeking, and his will be a voice that can articulately speak to the health care reforms that, in the Rasmussen Poll, find 59 percent of Hoosiers favor repealing.

 So there are a U.S. Senate seat and a U.S. House seat on the post-Bayh endangered list.

 Now look at the Indiana House seats. HD76 is an open seat now that State Rep. Trent Van Haaften has migrated to the 8th CD. The Democrat domino is State Sen. Bob Dieg, who is making a rare move from the Indiana Senate to the House. But the Republicans have a great candidate in educator Wendy McNamara and so a once “safe or llikely” Democrat seat goes into the “Tossup” zone because it is open, the GOP candidate is strong, and the environment is decidedly Republican.

 So there are a U.S. Senate seat, a U.S. House seat, and an Indiana House seat at “Tossup” or worse for the Democrats.

 Until Bayh’s last appearance on the ballot, he had long coattails for the Indiana House candidates, usually taking three new House seats with him. The wardrobe has changed. Ellsworth is wearing a tuxedo T-shirt as opposed to evening wear. When you go through the Indiana House Horse Race list, there are three Democratic seats that we believe are likely to head into the GOP column (held by Reps. Nancy Michael, Ron Herrell and the open seat of Vern Tincher). So there goes the House. It was poised to go anyway, but Democrats at this milepost are looking at a sieve.

 There are another three or four Southern Indiana House seats in addition to those already discussed (held by State Reps. Gail Riecken, Paul Robertson, Bob Bischoff) that are out of the “Safe” and “Likely” Democratic column and into the “Leans” category. Seven Democratic seats are in “Tossup.”

 So the tally is now a U.S. Senate seat, a U.S. House seat (and we haven’t even touched on the Bayh coattails as related to U.S. Reps. Joe Donnelly and Baron Hill who will be in a “Tossup” race next week) and now perhaps three to six Indiana House seats in play … and this is a potential disaster.

 But you can’t pin all the blame on Evan Bayh for a tsunami scenario. What you can blame on Bayh is the 11th hour timing (on Feb. 15, President’s Day) and the Chinese fire drill that followed, as well as that Democratic primary ballot that didn’t even have the U.S. Senate race listed.

 This gets into base motivation and voter intensity. The Democrats lost those elements in 1994 and paid a dear price. The fact that 30 Democrats on the Central Committee will make the Senate nomination call is old style, paternalistic politics. Now add the high support for health care repeal, President Obama’s 43/58 fav/unfavs and this is, at this point (to be charitable) one fine mess.

The columnist publishes at www.howeypolitics.com.

By Brian Howey

“You’ve got to stand for something; or you’re gonna fall for anything.”

                                                                                                                 – John Mellencamp

NASHVILLE, Ind. – If I had tried to concoct a more bizarre scenario than the one a little more than a week into the post-Evan Bayh era, I don’t think I could do it. Hoosier politics have entered the twilight zone with maybe some David Lynch video and a soundtrack by John Mellencamp thrown in for good measure.

Here’s the sequence. Evan Bayh, the boy bred to be a U.S. senator, announces his retirement on President’s Day. So many jaws hit the floor than it registers on the Richter Scale. He does so just hours before the county signature filing deadline, so Democratic primary voters don’t get to choose the nominee who will be voting on jobs, health reform and, say, the next U.S. Supreme Court Justice. No, it will be the 32-person Democratic Central Committee who makes the choice.

Indiana’s three Blue Dog congressmen are natural heirs. Rep. Joe Donnelly says no thanks. Telegenic Brad “Landslide” Ellsworth ponders. Baron Hill is visiting U.S. troops in Afghanistan and he can’t even talk to his staff. Meanwhile, Bayh says he won’t dictate a successor. And an Internet campaign surfaces to draft Mellencamp and picks up steam by the day.

By Thursday, speculation is rampant that Ellsworth is the guy, despite Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott casting an eye and asking, “Is this going to be an open process?”

Later that day, I’m told the details. Ellsworth runs for the Senate, with the Politiburo … er … Central Committee quickly lending its imprimatur, even though it can’t officially nominate him until after the May 4 primary.

State Rep. Trent Van Haaften files for 8th District Congress. State Sen. Bob Dieg files for Van Haaften’s House seat. Baron is still missing in action. And on Monday, Ellsworth withdraws from the 8th. He gives up his Congressional seat! (I don’t use many exclamation points.)

So, it’s Ellsworth, right? He’s the guy? He’s never had an opponent (in two Vanderburgh sheriff races and two congressional elections) come within 30,000 votes of him. He was voted the most beautiful hunk on Capitol Hill.

Hey, wait a minute. Baron returns from Afghanistan and tells CNN, he’s “interested.” There is no slam-dunk for Ellsworth on the Central Committee. “A lot of non-committals,” Hill says. “Some for Brad; some for me. So it’s fluid.” Hill is a fiery competitor and while Evan Bayh did drop his bombshell on him while he was on the other side of the planet via a phone call through military channels, you can imagine Baron’s reaction.

Does Bayh’s timing have anything to do with Baron endorsing Barack Obama during the critical 2008 primary homestretch while Evan was telling the team to back Hillary?

My publication – Howey Politics Indiana – that includes analysis and predictions moves the Senate race from “Likely Democrat” and the 8th from “Leans Democrat” into the “Tossup” category. And if Baron leaves the 9th for a Senate race, the 9th probably moves into “Leans Republican.”

The Central Committee is all over the map. The Stonewalls see Ellsworth as anti-gay. The Latinos – the fastest growing voting bloc in Indiana – aren’t on board. By Wednesday, McDermott is describing coming events in each of the nine districts where “all” the candidates will make their pitch, beginning Sunday in Baron’s 9th.

That, in a big, big nutshell, is the position Sen. Bayh – the leader of the modern Indiana Democratic Party – handed them when he decided to quit. There is rampant speculation as to why he quit. He says it was due to the “dysfunctional” nature of Congress. And it is, but not as dysfunctional as it was during the Vietnam era, or the McCarthy era, or when senators were beating each other with canes in the Civil War run up.

Could it be that Bayh’s wife, Susan, sits on the board of Wellpoint, which just jacked up health insurance premiums from 20 to 40 percent? Or that she made $2 million in the last two years sitting on the board?

When we last left Evan, Politico was interviewing him: “I’m concerned about the future of the country,” Bayh said over the phone, with Indiana-grown rock star John Mellencamp waiting on hold to speak with him. “We face some major and gathering crises … and we’re not getting nearly enough done to deal with those challenges. Some of that is institutional, some of that is cultural, (and) the way the place operates.”

The way that which place operates?

The columnist publishes at www.howeypolitics.com.

By Brian Howey

FRANKLIN, Ind. – In the early days of my career as a columnist, I watched a young Indiana secretary of state named Evan Bayh enter office only to find a mess. As the state’s chief elections officer, he had to preside over a Congressional and two legislative recounts in Northern Indiana.

In the 3rd District, Democrat Tom Ward had come within a handful of votes of upsetting U.S. Rep. John Hiler in 1986. Several months later, Bayh ruled that Hiler had won after an arduous recount process, angering some Democrats who had pressured him to rule for the party and not for the process.

When Bayh abruptly announced last Monday that he would not stand for reelection in a decision that stunned just about everyone, he mentioned that 1986 race. “I cast the deciding vote in the closest Congressional race in the nation for a member of the other political party because I believed he had legitimately won the election,” Bayh said.

He would go on to level a searing indictment of American politics today. “After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned,” Bayh said. “To put it in words most Hoosiers can understand: I love working for the people of Indiana, I love helping our citizens make the most of their lives, but I do not love Congress. I have always tried to remember that my job is to work for Hoosiers, not the other way around, and I am constantly reminded that if Washington, D.C. could be more like Indiana, Washington would be a better place.”

His assessment of Congress is on target. I have never been more disgusted with the partisanship and lack of progress and issues such as health care, the deficits and reforming the financial system than I am today.

While Bayh rightly targets this polarization on Capitol Hill, he literally did so by disenfranchising every Democratic Party voter in Indiana.

He waited until the day before the filing deadline to announce his decision. His former chief of staff, William Moreau Jr., told me, “This has been going on for quite some time. Certainly it would be accurate to characterize it as months.” There were reports out of Washington that Bayh had considered retirement, but nobody thought he would do it just hours before the filing deadline.

The irony is that he did it on President’s Day, when his own presidential ambitions have been dashed after using the various stepping-stones – secretary of state, governor, U.S. Senator – to get there, only to be eclipsed by Barack Obama.

Why would he do that?

It’s about control. Bayh wants to decide who his successor will be. He just didn’t believe that Democrats could work the process, declare candidacies, build campaigns, raise money, come up with new ideas and bring them successfully before the voters.

All of the natural heirs were completely caught off guard. U.S. Rep, Baron Hill was on a military tour in Afghanistan. U.S. Reps. Joe Donnelly and Brad Ellsworth were already deep into their reelection bids.

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott was interested in running, but didn’t know if it would be an “open and fair process” and wondered if Democrats had been disenfranchised. “If it’s truly an open seat, let us know. Or let us know if it’s a done deal,” said McDermott.

While decrying the decay of the political process in Washington, Bayh chose to bow out with cynical, controlling paternalism; that Democrats in his home state aren’t mature enough or wise enough to decide who would step up.

The roots of this may stem from 2008 when a barely veiled attempt by his team that controls the party backed Indianapolis architect Jim Schellinger for governor. Schellinger ran a terrible campaign and was defeated by former congresswoman Jill Long Thompson. Both candidates were broke at the end of the primary and Gov. Mitch Daniels went on to win by 18 percent. In the eyes of Bayh and the party elders, the primary was messy, expensive and out of their control.

Literally, as I am writing this column, the Indiana Democratic Central Committee is engaged in a conference call to determine who gets the nomination, instead of the hundreds of thousands of Hoosier Democratic voters who could have decided in a “legitimate election.”

Meanwhile, the five Republicans – Dan Coats, State Sen. Marlin Stutzman, John Hostettler, Richard Behney and Don Bates Jr. – are following the law and lining up the 4,500 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot as a prelude to exercising an essential task in democracy.

Bayh began his elective career as a beacon for not only Democrats, but also hundreds of thousands of Republicans and independents that voted for him. He stood tall in the 1986 election and as governor and senator did many good things. Last Friday night, I had dinner with a Franklin College student who benefited from his 21st Century Scholars program that pays for her tuition.

But Bayh ended it by playing party boss, making a decision for his “children” in the Democratic Party, who hadn’t earned his trust after so many years of doing his bidding.

Howey publishes at www.howeypolitics.com.

By Brian Howey

INDIANAPOLIS – Late on the afternoon of Groundhog Day, U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh was meeting with a group of Hoosiers in his Washington office discussing the green economy. As the meeting broke up, Bayh quipped, “Now I’ve got to go deal with a German ambassador.”

No one in the room but the senator knew that all hell was about to break loose. By ten that evening, Howey Politics Indiana broke the story that former senator Dan Coats was preparing a challenge to Bayh. A quick phone call to Indiana Democratic Chairman Dan Parker as the news was breaking brought a response, “You’re going to make me work this late at night?” followed by the chairman noting a few minutes later that Coats had lobbied for Bank of America. That was curious attention to what would have been obscure detail only hours earlier.

In the next several days, Bayh surrogates from Parker – also his campaign manager – to the Democratic Senatorial Committee unleashed a withering array of information attacking Coats. He is a registered federal lobbyist. He represented Yemen, a terrorist redoubt. He helped Bank of American land $15 billion in TARP funds. He worked for a company with a partnership with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. He lives in Virginia, has since 1999 and has voted there for the past decade. He wants to retire in North Carolina.

By end of the week, the DSCC was pumping out a video recording with Coats speaking to the North Carolina delegation at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. It began with the former Fort Wayne Republican saying he wanted to retire to NC, but “don’t tell the good people of Indiana ….” Politico described it as the “nuking of Dan Coats” with a series of “ferocious attacks” that was akin to a “freight train.”

And the attacks were not confined to Democrats. State Sen. Marlin Stutzman, who is seeking the GOP nomination, held a press conference, calling Coats a “Washington elitist.” He followed up on the DSCC attacks by asking, “Dan, the ‘good folks’ in Indiana have some questions. How involved were you and your firm in securing billions of dollars in taxpayer money for the bailouts?” He rhetorically asked about Coat’s law firm and its business with Hugo Chavez; its ties to the “terrorist breeding ground in Yemen.”

These defining attacks came straight from the playbook of … Dan Coats. In 1992 he flattened the aspirations of Democratic Secretary of State Joe Hogsett with video of the Indiana Statehouse while the commercial voice-over asked, “Where’s Joe?” The attacks came early in the campaign, questioning Hogsett’s promise to serve a full term as secretary of state before he challenged Coats.

On Wednesday morning, high above the snowy streets of Indianapolis, Coats affirmed his candidacy, leaving little doubt that he would attain the 4,500 signatures by next Friday, and walked through the attacks, confronting some, explaining others, promising full disclosure in the near future.

He also presented the rationale for his candidacy and it hinged on U.S. Rep. Mike Pence’s decision not to get into the race. Coats said that when Pence “decided not to run, I rose to the call” to take on what he called Bayh’s “presidential war chest.”

Coats said that the anemic fund-raising of the pending Republican field that includes Stutzman, Don Bates Jr., former congressman John Hostettler and Richard Behney – under $500,000 combined – prodded him to get into the race. “That was a major factor because I know what it takes. I believed I was in the best position to get what it takes to make this a successful effort. I didn’t think anyone else could do it.”

As for the criticism, Coats said he talked about retiring to North Carolina because his wife’s 90-year-old parents live there. “I’ve owned property in Indiana for a long time,” Coats responded, though he doesn’t now.

As for his lobbying, he said that the some of his partners represented Bank of America, Yemen and companies doing business in Venezuela. “We’re going to make everything totally transparent and let Hoosiers decide whether what I did was appropriate instead of having the Democratic political machine telling them what I did.”

Coats served 18 years in Congress and points to his work seeking a balanced budget amendment and a line item veto that had U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd vowing its passage “over my dead body.” It did pass in the Senate. Coats, along with then Sen. Sam Nunn, crafted the “don’t ask; don’t tell” approach to gays in the military.

“What has happened in this past year is the American public has woken up to what the liberal agenda really means for this country,” Coats said. “They have spoken resoundingly in Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts said ‘no.’ A lot of people are getting that message. Nancy Pelosi hasn’t. Harry Reid hasn’t. Rahm Emanuel hasn’t.”

Speaking about health care, the stimulus and TARP, Coats criticized Bayh, “because every Democratic senator is the 60th senator – it would have taken only one person to stand up and say no and stop this thing. On every one of these issues instead of standing up for Hoosiers, he sided with the president.”

The columnist publishes at www.howeypolitics.com.

INDIANAPOLIS – Informed and reliable sources are telling Howey Politics Indiana that former U.S. Sen. Dan Coats will announce Wednesday he will challenge U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh.

 Coats was up for re-election in 1998 when he decided to retire, citing the pressures of constant fund-raising. Bayh went on that year to defeat former Fort Wayne Mayor Paul Helmke to reclaim his father’s Senate seat.

 Coats was almost named President George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary instead of Donald Rumsfeld, and later was named ambassador to Germany.

 Coats would join the Republican field that includes State Sen. Marlin Stutzman, plumber and Tea Party activist Richard Behney, former Congressman John Hostettler and Winchester financier Don. Bates Jr.

 Coats entered Congress by winning Dan Quayle’s House seat in 1980, then was appointed by Gov. Robert D. Orr to fill Quayle’s Senate seat when he ascended to the vice presidency in 1989.

By Brian Howey

INDIANAPOLIS – When I tried to contact Evan Bayh’s Senate office last week for some information and perhaps a brief interview, I knew something was up. It was late morning and the switchboard was swamped. I couldn’t get through, couldn’t leave a message.

Moveon.org was waging a full assault after Bayh told Bob Schieffer on CBS News’ Washington Unplugged on Oct. 28 that he might support the Republican filibuster on the health reforms, “if there are things in the bill I think are just beyond the pale. Some people argue that we should vote to go forward on a bill even if we don’t like it. As we get further along in this, I view procedure and substance as being largely one and the same. I’d like to move forward, but some of that’s going to depend on if it is fiscally responsible.”

Fair enough. After two terms in the Senate, Evan Bayh’s station centers on fatherhood and that of a deficit hawk. But the Congressional Budget Office estimate on Chairman Max Baucus’ bill that passed Senate Finance has it reducing the deficit by $80 billion over the next decade. More CBO estimates are coming.

With Moveon moving in; as activists descended on Bayh’s Indianapolis and South Bend offices with petitions; and with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee producing a Research 2000 poll showing that 52 percent of Hoosiers backed the health reforms and 51 percent of the Democrats would abandon Bayh for a non-existent primary challenger in 2010, the senator appears to be backtracking.

By Oct. 29, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported, “Sen. Bayh told us it is extraordinarily unlikely that he would filibuster health reform. He said there is nothing in the bill he is aware of now that would cause him to vote to filibuster and he said that he currently ‘can’t think of a set of circumstances under which he would vote against cloture.’”

But it wasn’t over. He told WLFI-TV in Lafayette that his comments were misconstrued. “They asked if there were any conceivable circumstances where I might possibly imagine not being able to support the legislation? I said I suppose theoretically, and immediately I was opposed to it going forward, but I made it clear it had to be completely unconscionable and I was unaware of anything that meets that test in the bill.”

Whew.

Evan Bayh maneuvered himself to become a moderate arbiter in the Senate. Now he has become the most conspicuous.

Layered on top of all the health reform drama is Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s new book, “Audacity to Lead.” Bayh, he explains, essentially lost the vice presidential nomination in August 2008 by a “coin toss.”

“Bayh’s answers to our questions were substantively close to perfect, if cautiously so,” Plouffe writes. “Seeing Bayh right after (Sen. Joe) Biden provided some interesting contrasts and comparisons. Listening to Bayh talk, I thought, ‘There’s no way this guy will color outside the lines.’”

Obama announced on Aug. 17, “It’s Biden.” And while the campaign had to endure Biden’s errant off-script cracks, the choice seemed to reconfirm what many Hoosiers already knew: Bayh is the cautious seeker and not the bold reformer that Barack Obama sought as a partner.

But here’s the delicious twist: Evan Bayh may hold the fate of President Obama’s most prized reforms in his hands. And it comes as even more controversy swirls. The fact that Sen. Bayh’s wife, Susan, made $2 million over the past two years serving on the corporate boards of several health and insurance companies complicates the picture. The fact that she joined all these boards after Bayh joined the Senate in 1999 has some suggesting the family has profited handsomely from the status quo.

Or as CNN’s Rick Sanchez put it last Monday, “A senator whose vote could, in large measure, decide the fate of the health insurance companies, has a wife who’s getting more than $2 million from the health insurance companies. Did you hear what I just said? Yes, I’m talking about you, Democratic Senator Evan Bayh.”

Bayh’s wild week had gotten even crazier. But Plouffe offered cover in his book. “It was clear her positions would draw fire if we selected him,” Plouffe says of Susan Bayh. “He passionately defended his wife’s board service, both terms of her professional qualifications and talent as well as the lengths they both traveled to remove any conflict of interest. We were satisfied he could bat down any question on that front.”

So the emerging narrative on this key sequence in the Bayh political career is one of a deficit hawk, an arbiter, a cautious senator, a man in pursuit of power subsequently denied. And now, Evan Bayh stands at the fulcrum that could define that very presidency.

Howey publishes at www.howeypolitics.com

by Brian Howey, The Howey Political Report, Indianapolis

FRANKLIN, Ind. – Eight years ago – after the Sept. 11 attacks, the anthrax scares, and Beltway snipers – the United States arrived in Afghanistan. It was a place that used to mean wasted news hole on meaningless topics as journalism schools railed against “Afghanistanism.” It was an inhospitable place that swallowed empires, as the British and Soviets painfully learned.

And in October 2002, with Indiana’s U.S. Sens. Dick Lugar and Evan Bayh voting for the Iraq war resolution, Afghanistan took a backseat in the American Humvee. Now cruel twists in Afghanistan await President Barack Obama. Some say it could become his Vietnam.

The worst-case scenario is emerging. NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned in a leaked memo: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months), while Afghan security capacity matures, risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

President Obama noted that he was “skeptical” of ramping up troops there. “Until I’m satisfied that we’ve got the right strategy I’m not gonna be sending some young man or woman over there – beyond what we already have,” Obama said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

What has become clear is what Sen. Lugar describes as a “vigorous” internal debate within the White House over what to do next. Vice President Joe Biden, a Lugar friend and confidant, has been pushing to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out al Qaeda there and in Pakistan.

During his opening statement at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 17, Lugar said the time for “studying” the situation has come and gone and said of Obama, “It is widely hoped that he will produce a coherent operational strategy for U.S. engagement in Afghanistan. Such an integrated strategy has yet to be unveiled despite the many high- and low-level reviews, and none has been described by the President with the force and conviction necessary to persuade the American people to endorse what will likely be a much longer, albeit necessary, commitment to achieve stability in the region.”

And he noted that many – apparently led by Biden – are pushing for something other than more troops in Afghanistan. “Some are suggesting al Qaeda may be in 10 or 20 places,” Lugar said. “So the suggestion is why don’t we have, as opposed to boots on the ground in Afghanistan, in greater numbers as we do now, a mobile force of troops … in some Middle Eastern country in locations that are hospitable and from where they could launch attacks on people.”

The problem with that strategy is at least two-fold. One is that a mobile strike force must have operational intelligence. Lugar noted, “This has been a major drawback with many questioning in Afghanistan and Pakistan how adequate our intelligence is.”

Secondly, there is NATO in the midst of its first major military commitment off the European continent and its future could be at stake. “We have encouraged our allies from NATO to stay the course,” Lugar said, adding, “bit by bit their parliaments are meeting. Many don’t have many troops there but they are withdrawing them.”

Sen. Bayh explained, “It’s a very hard situation and regrettably immediately after 911 we went after the people who attacked us: the Taliban and al Qaeda. We had a lot of momentum in our favor and the opportunity to really stabilize the country was significant. Unfortunately Iraq then came along and diverted our resources and our attention. It put Afghanistan on the back burner. Regrettably the Taliban has gotten back on their feet and there are sanctuaries in Pakistan. So the situation is more difficult to solve than it otherwise would have been.”

Bayh said he was open to a “temporary” troop ramp up. “I would support that, particularly to build up the Afghan forces. That gives us the best chance of leaving in a way that stabilizes Afghanistan.”

And Bayh discussed the mobile force option. “Very often you have to have boots on the ground to get the intelligence. And so my guess is it wouldn’t be quite so easy to withdraw and deal with this.”

Many of us got a glimpse of Afghan history during the Tom Hanks movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War” where the Americans helped defeat the Soviets, then left. “There’s a feeling on the part of Afghanistan and Pakistan that the last time around we withdrew abruptly, all of our troops,” Lugar said. “It leads to rumors that after all is said and done, our commitment has its limits and will be fairly short.”

Bayh was more blunt: “We’re not in Afghanistan to help the Afghans. We’re in Afghanistan because we were attacked from there and 3,000 Americans were killed.”

The columnist publishes at www.howeypolitics.com.