Sen. Evan Bayh (D)

Evan Bayh is a Democrat elected to the Senate in 1998. He is a former Indiana governor and the son of Birch Bayh, a U.S. senator from 1963 to 1981. (Father and son in fact have the same full name, Birch Evans Bayh, although they use different derivations.) Evan Bayh was just 6 years old when his father was elected to the Senate, and he grew up mostly in Washington, attending the prestigious St. Albans School and eventually earning a law degree from the University of Virginia. Bayh (BYE) returned to Indiana to practice law—and politics. His father, a popular figure in Indiana politics for decades, lost his 1980 re-election bid to Republican Rep. Dan Quayle. Six years later, his son picked up the family tradition of public service by winning election as Indiana secretary of state. In 1988, at age 32, Bayh ran for governor. Republicans had held the office and controlled most of the state government for 20 years. However, their smooth-running machine had grown sluggish. The Republican nominee promised change and innovation, but Bayh was a young, fresh face with a well-known political name. He won. As governor, he balanced the budget, cut taxes, and piled up a $1.6 billion budget surplus. He trimmed a deficit in state pension plans and reduced Medicaid spending. He claimed credit for the creation of 350,000 jobs that helped revive Indiana’s manufacturing economy. He did less to reform education and other government services, but he was immensely popular when he left office.

A shot at his father’s old Senate seat came along in 1998, when Republican Dan Coats decided not to seek re-election. At the time, Bayh was serving on the board of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The company, whose headquarters is in Indianapolis, is not only a major employer in the state but also a major political backer. Bayh’s GOP opponent was Fort Wayne Mayor Paul Helmke, who had supported increasing the city’s taxes and even expressed fondness for Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he had known since law school. (He had narrowly won the Republican primary with 35% by besting two more conservative candidates.) In the campaign against Bayh, Helmke called his opponent “the empty suit.” But Bayh’s platform—a balanced budget, saving Social Security, raising education standards, and a “fairer, flatter” tax—pre-empted Helmke’s pitch for the Hoosier State’s political center. Bayh ran ads showing his wife, Susan, extolling his accomplishments, saying he “cracked down on deadbeat dads, sponsored Indiana’s fatherhood initiative, … worked to make our schools safer and drug-free and to move people from welfare to work.” Bayh won 64%-35%, carrying 88 of 92 counties.

If his father had a mostly liberal voting record, Evan Bayh has seemed more at home in the center of the Democratic Party in the Senate, even at times alienating liberal groups. He was one of the Democrats who early on indicated they would support the Iraq war resolution. He continued to support the Bush administration on Iraq through the fall of 2004. In 2005, he voted for a bankruptcy bill that was generally favorable to creditors. In September 2008, he supported an energy bill that permitted some offshore oil drilling. And he was the only Democrat to vote against the Democratic budget resolution in March 2008.

Indiana’s economy is based heavily on manufacturing. In 2000, Bayh voted for normal trade relations with China, but more recently, he has been critical of China. In 2006, he called for tariffs on Chinese imports “until they get right the currency issue.” In 2007, he pressed for countervailing duties on China and other countries that subsidize exports and keep their currencies artificially low. The following year, he said that the International Trade Commission should act against steel pipe imports from China. In 2005, he opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

Bayh serves on the Armed Services and Select Intelligence committees. As an early backer of the Iraq war, he won votes in the Armed Services Committee for hundreds of millions of dollars for equipment for U.S. soldiers fighting overseas. Ultimately, he became disillusioned with the war effort, calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation in December 2004. In 2005, he voted against the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of State, saying that as an architect of the war she “did not deserve a promotion.” But he also said: “To cut and run at this juncture would be a terrible mistake.” In 2006, he voted against setting a date certain for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. In May 2007, he and moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine sponsored a bill for troop withdrawals starting in four months if the Iraqis did not meet certain political benchmarks. In July 2007, Bayh voted for a measure to withdraw troops in 120 days. He also co-sponsored a successful amendment in June 2008 to offload reconstruction costs from the United States to the Iraqi government.

During the debate over energy policy in the 110th Congress (2007-08), Bayh and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana sponsored a bill to reduce U.S. oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels a day by 2016, with tax incentives for fuel-efficient vehicles and other incentives for ethanol and biodiesel. It passed as an amendment in June 2007. During debate on the immigration bill in 2007, Bayh sought to require the posting of job openings on a national website before employers could seek visas for foreign workers.

Bayh was serving on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee in September 2008 when the crisis in the financial markets hit. “There was a palpable sense that the nation’s economy was hanging in the balance,” he said. He voted for the $700 billion bailout of banks and financial institutions, calling the bill a “distasteful but necessary step to protect millions of innocent people from the malfeasance of a few.” Indiana is a major auto-manufacturing state, and Bayh spoke out for the Big Three automakers bailout bill in December 2008. With Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, he argued that any benefits from economic stimulus legislation should be distributed on the basis of a state’s economic health. Bayh also said the legislation should include funding for next-generation vehicles.

His re-election in 2004 was never in doubt. He won a slightly lower percentage of votes than in 1998, but he prevailed 62%-37% and carried 86 of 92 counties. He received the highest number of popular votes ever for an Indiana senator, a noteworthy achievement considering that George W. Bush carried the state 60%-39% that year. Bayh has often been mentioned as a candidate for national office. (His father ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976, losing the nomination to Jimmy Carter.) In July 2000, he was on Al Gore’s short list of vice presidential possibilities. But leaders of feminist organizations opposed him because of his vote to ban a procedure called “partial-birth” abortion. In June 2001, he announced that he wouldn’t run for president in 2004 but held the door open for a vice presidential nomination. From 2001 to 2005, he chaired the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, which had helped foster Bill Clinton’s national career. As the 2008 election approached, Bayh seemed open to taking the presidential plunge.

His voting record began to align more with that of his party. He joined filibusters to stop the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, the bill to limit medical malpractice lawsuits, and several judicial nominations. He joined almost all other Democrats in rejecting President Bush’s 2005 proposal to add individual investment accounts to Social Security. He voted against the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In 2005 and 2006, Bayh made frequent trips to the early presidential contest states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and by the fall of 2006, he had raised over $10 million. In early December 2006, he announced the creation of an exploratory committee, but two weeks later announced he was out of the running. “I concluded that due to circumstances beyond our control the odds were longer than I felt I could responsibly pursue,” Bayh said. “This path, and these long odds, would have required me to be essentially absent from the Senate for the next year instead of working to help the people of my state and the nation.” He may also have calculated that the Democratic victories of 2006 had made the party less receptive to a centrist nominee.

Bayh still seemed to harbor interest in the vice presidential nomination, however. In February 2007, he said, “I love being in the Senate and I’d like to think I make a difference here. But, you know, if you’re president or vice president, I think you have an even greater opportunity to help our country, and that’s what I’m all about. In September 2007, he endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., for the party’s nomination, and he traveled extensively to campaign for her. At that time, polls suggested that the Democrats had a chance to carry Indiana, which made Bayh attractive as a potential running mate. He campaigned hard for Clinton in the Indiana primary but failed to satisfy some of the Clinton people. They were displeased because her margin of victory there was small (she won 51%-49%) and because Bayh was unable to persuade Lake County officials to report the primary results early enough to get them on prime-time TV. Later, after Clinton lost the nomination fight, Bayh heartily supported Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. Ultimately, though, he was not Obama’s choice for vice president.