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?”

Brian Howey

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.

Brian Howey

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?

Evan Bayh

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.

Brian Howey

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.

 The source, a former aide, said that Coats knows he has about two weeks to gather the 4,500 signatures – 500 per Congressional district – in two weeks.

Dan Coats

 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.

Brian Howey

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.

Brian Howey

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.”

Sen. Evan Bayh

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.”

Sen. Richard Lugar

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.