It's Too Haaard
by digby
In a final act of perfidy, Evan Bayh walks away from reelection at the last possible moment, thus ensuring that the voters will not have a chance to choose and allowing the party apparatus to pick a Blue Dog creep to replace him. It just doesn't get any better than this.
The good news is that we are separating the men from the boys. The Democrats have everything, but it's all so icky and hard that a whole bunch of them are just walking away. Good riddance. If they don't have the cojones to stick it out when their country needs them, then they shouldn't be in politics.
I'm glad these guys weren't in charge during the Depression and WWII. We'd all be dirt farming for the Greater Axis Empire today.
Update: Ron Brownstein made a similar point On Andrea Mitchell this morning:
It's hard to see how he justifies this to other Democrats. But look it's more broadly what's happening with the Democratic Party. They've gone from 93-94, it took them 15 years to reestablish unified control of the House and the Senate and the White House as they did in 2009. And here they are, one year into it and the party seems to be in many respects losing its nerve. You have the Bayh thing as the latest in a series of --, Beau Biden, Lisa Madigan in Illinois, a variety of Democratic House members in tough districts walking away.
Look, politics is a contact sport and the Democrats have had the best opportunity they've had in 15 years to advance their agenda, and yet as they take all the flack that comes with that it feels like some of the party is crumbling and losing their nerve. Stunning decision.
Yes it is. But we've heard Democratic establishment rumblings that they'd actually prefer to have a Republican congress because then nobody can expect them to deliver anything but bipartisan neoliberal policy which is what they prefer to deliver. It's hard to see how Obama rallies his base even for the presidential, though, unless the Republicans run Dick Cheney in 2012. Which is possible. The Democrats are a bunch of timorous little schoolkids, but the Republicans are flat out nuts. Oy.
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