Bye Bayh Blackbird, Part 3

And we already have Charles Lane from WaPo blaming the Dirty F'ckin Hippies for the loss of America's Greatest Senator, Evan Bayh.

For months now, Bayh has been screaming at the top of his voice that the party needs to reorient toward a more popular, centrist agenda -- one that emphasizes jobs and fiscal responsibility over health care and cap and trade. Neither the White House nor the Senate leadership has given him the response he wanted. Their bungling of what should have been a routine bipartisan jobs bill last week seems to have been the last straw.


I don’t doubt that Bayh could have won re-election -- though he probably did not relish the prospect of a very nasty campaign revolving around GOP attacks on his wife’s business activities. Let it never be forgotten that Bayh is a perennial Democratic golden boy, the keynote speaker at the party’s 1996 convention, scion of a political dynasty, proven vote-getter in a red state and, in his own mind, prime presidential timber. For him, then, the question was: even if I win, who needs six more years of dealing with these people, after which I might be 60 years old and trying to pick up the pieces of a damaged political party brand? 

It's amazing.  George W. Bush ran the Republicans into the ground.  Just a year later, the Village has already declared Obama and the Democrats in the minority. But it's those last four words there..."damaged political party brand"... that define what it means to be a Villager.  If after eight years of Bush's rank incompetence, two bungled wars, Cheney's awful fouthbranch legal junta attempts, all of which leads to getting fully trounced in the 2008 elections, and then the backlash of the far right Teabagger Nation and the hatred that it has spawned haven't permanently decimated the GOP brand, nothing will...and yet it's the Democrats who have the "damaged political party brand."

Florida GOP Sen. Mel Martinez actually quit last year rather than deal with the GOP rampant racism and anti-immigrant fervor.  He really was an example of the kind of loss of a political moderate that Charles Lane is talking about.

But no, it's the Democrats who are permanently doomed in the eyes of the Village Elders.  They will never be the majority.  They will never have respect.  They will never have a mandate.

The Village has spoken.  The Hoffman Effect is ignored.  The Bayh Effect is the only thing that matters:  the Dems are shedding their precious, Hippie-hating moderates.