Surprise! Bayh's Choice Leaves State Party Officials Choosing Replacement Candidate

Waiting for the other shoe to drop. What was he into?

Thanks Evan, for screwing the Democratic Party...AGAIN.

Jerk.

He'd rather take the money. Expect more heat on Wellpoint/Anthem/Blue3 Cross & Shield.

4500 signatures is all you need? hell i could get that. though, not by friday. and the fact that i'm not 30 and not an indiana resident would probably be problematic...

I submit, Bayh's timing was deliberate. He wants to hand the Senate back to the GOPers.

Can I get some reporting on who replacement candidates may be? The Democratic bench in Indiana doesn't seem very deep. You have Northwest Indiana, from which a statewide candidate will NEVER get elected; several conservative Democratic congressmen who will have a hard time holding their own seats, let alone get elected statewide; and Indianapolis, though I believe their last 2 mayors were Republicans?

Absent some compelling, sudden excuse— be it good or bad (maybe a family member is in trouble, or he is ill— who knows?)— that Bayh feels at the moment he needs to keep private, this is a comment on Bayh's lack of any sense of personal responsibility for a commitment to be their candidate he implicitly made to Indiana Democrats. Whether or not a back room deal is a good way to pick a candidate (would Bay State pols have come up with Coakley?) there may be a few very good candidates who could keep Coats out of the Senate who could have used the seasoning a primary allows. Coats would be the third leg of an senatorial axis of evil that now includes Imhoff and DeMint.

Bayh gives a final FU to progressive Dems before heading over to Fox News. Or Dancing With The Stars.

I hope that Bayh wasn't the best that Indiana Democrats could get for that seat. If so, they've got some serious problems. Surely there must be someone less beholden to corporate interests than him who can make a serious run at it.

Supposedly Obama has known, but Reid didn't.

Evan Bayh's next stop is a lobbying career. Isn't his wife already doing that? Those people are gonna be seriously rich, not to mention unprincipled. (Man, that's a scoop.)

Are we seeing the first right wing Dem looking to capitalize on the teabagger phenomenon for 2012?

Just wondering if anyone else has pondered that as a motive.

Is Bayh thinking BIG?

Just food for thought.

Evan Bayh is a Republican-lite lawmaker who has no place in the Democratic Party (if it wants to represent the true people of this country).

http://www.sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/

Well, as someone who just watched a sluggish and dispirited Democratic Party select a TERRIBLE candidate for the Senate through the ordinary primary process in Massachusetts (e.g. Coakley), I'm not ready to slam the idea on allowing the party bosses to pick a Democratic candidate in Indiana quite yet. Generally speaking, Democratic voters are pretty deflated right now. Which means there's a decent chance that the voters who turn out for a primary may consist of the hardcore Democratic partisans, who tend to pay more attention to their particular viewpoint or agenda than the kind of generic positive attributes (charisma, articulation, etc.) that more casual voters would vote for. The risk is that you end up with someone like Coakley, who appeals to a subset of committed Democratic primary voters, but who is uniquely ill-suited to a general election against a charismatic opponent.

My sense was, without a big turnout among casual voters in the MA primary, the people voting were mostly insiders, hardcore politicos, and partisans. And the strange thing about people who follow politics closely is this: even though we sometimes talk and think about a candidate's "electability", it's almost like we lack the ability to immediately sense which candidate will be most palatable for your average, semi-engaged general election voter. Our selection criteria is simply...different from that of more casual voters.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, in Massachusetts at least, we **might** have benefited from a hand-selected candidate who was chosen by the party bosses (with input from national Dems) based on a clear-eyed assessment of who could win. Obviously, I think everyone in MA - including the party bosses - was caught off guard by how popular Brown would become, but I have a feeling that Coakley would not have been the first choice of your average Democratic consultant, if that consultant was tasked with picking the ideal candidate to win a tough general election.

Of course, I think there is good reason to fear that the Indiana party establishment is going to gravitate towards a Bayh clone. And that is a very valid concern. We can only hope that the powers that be in Indiana use the opportunity to bypass the primary process to select an up-and-comer in the party, who may have lacked the name recognition to win a primary, but will turn into a credible candidate over the course of the general election process. I'm not exactly hopeful. All I'm saying that, having watched the Coakley debacle up close, I am not overly confident that the primary process will produce someone better at this moment in history.

A coward and piece of sh-t is not a good combo

Regarding Bayh's income from WELLPOINT...

His wife is raking it in with Stock Options every quarter.

http://www.correntewire.com/todays_single_payer_post_susan_bayh

Evan Bayh is a complete idiot. He handled this with the same deftness as he did with health care.

Of course with "leadership" from the likes of Obama and Reed, it's no wonder.

i consider myself an independent although i have voted for democrates for the last few years and am a big Obama fan, but the rabid democrates are just as bad as the rabid republicans, all fixated on winning and not governing. can't wait for a third party to surface, as long as they are not tea party nuts.

Blatant move to shut progressives out of the two-party scamocracy.

If Bayh isn't preparing for a run for president, he is preparing for a pay day, along with his wife and the Health Insurance lobby!

With every passing day it becomes more acutely obvious that the United States desperately needs a third party.

A progressive party, for a change of pace.

The two corporations (DemocRats and Reprobates) currently running our governments exhibit determination to screw the populous out of every last penny and give it all to the wealthy while simultaneously destroying the economic viability of our society and infrastructure through deliberate neglect.

palin is an earmarks marxist

leading global warming expert says humans contribute significantly to global warming

leading global warming expert says humans contribute significantly to global warming

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scottsoperson

February 15, 2010 10:48 PM

http://cei.org/gencon/019,04940.cfm

leading global warming skeptic says humans contribute significantly to global warming.

http://cei.org/gencon/019,04940.cfm

myron ebell says: "Nor am I a "climate change denier", a term used to put people in the bin next to Holocaust deniers. As I have said in hundreds of interviews and talks, there is no doubt that the climate has always been changing and that human activities - especially burning vast quantities of coal, oil and natural gas - now play a significant role in causing current changes."

I'm just glad this particular scumbag is out of the Democratic party. What a relief!

ed schultes says reid pulled the jobs bill because he's mad or something.

Good riddance. Another elite, selfish, big business Democrat gone. Let him go use his self-described 'executive' talent in one of the big corporations he so ardently represented in the Senate.