An Early Post-Mortem

The WSJ wastes no time assigning blame for the loss of America's Greatest Senator, Evan F'ckin' Bayh, to the failed rotting corpse of the failed Obama Presidency that failed so badly that it failed decades before Obama was elected (only to fail.)

The political retirement of Evan Bayh, at age 54, is being portrayed by various sages as a result of too much partisanship, or the Senate's dysfunction, or even the systemic breakdown of American governance. Most of this is rationalization. The real story, of which Mr. Bayh's frustration is merely the latest sign, is the failure once again of liberal governance.

For the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House. Republicans haven't had such large majorities since the 1920s. Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance.

Democrats failed in the latter half of the 1960s, as the twin burdens of the Great Society and Vietnam ended the Kennedy boom and split their party. They failed again after Watergate, as Congress dragged Jimmy Carter to the left and liberals had no answer for stagflation. They failed a third time in the first two Bill Clinton years, as tax increases and HillaryCare led to the Gingrich Congress before Mr. Clinton salvaged his Presidency by tacking to the center. 

Those are pretty harsh words considering the "centrist" policies of Bush led to a near meltdown of the country and a recession we're still digging out of, a recession that the WSJ and other Right Wing Noise Machine outlets believed can be best solved by doing nothing and allowing the same practices to continue unabated.  That was the very real failure preceding this Presidency.  To the robber barons here, it's just another uncomfortable recession instead of the worst "crackup" in modern American history.  And yes, Bayh deserves his fair share of scorn for that.

A fourth crackup is already well underway and is even more remarkable considering how Democrats were set up for success. Inheriting a recession amid GOP failures, Democrats had the chance to restore economic confidence and fix the financial system with modest reforms that would let them take credit for the inevitable recovery. Yet only 13 months later, Democrats are down in the polls, their agenda is stymied by Democratic opposition, and their House and Senate majorities are in peril as moderates like Mr. Bayh flee the scene of this political accident.

Democrats have responded by blaming "obstructionist" Republicans, who lack the votes to block anything by themselves; or a failure to communicate the right message, though President Obama is a master communicator; or even Madison's framework of checks and balances, though this system has worked better than all others for some 225 years.

John Podesta, who ran Mr. Obama's transition and heads the Center for American Progess that has supplied the Administration's ideas, summed up the liberal-media mood last week when he told the Financial Times that American governance now "sucks." If you can't blame your own ideas, blame the system.

This raises three more points:

First, does anyone believe when we were hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month in early 2009 that Obama and the Democrats were being set up for success by inheriting that mess?  If it was so easy to fix, why didn't Bush do it earlier?  Why was the recovery inevitable?  And yes, Bayh responds by running away.  That's his problem, not Obama's.

Second, with the illnesses of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, and the months it took to seat Al Franken, it still took a party switch by Arlen Specter to give the Dems 60 votes, and that was only for a couple of months.  Once again that's now gone.  And once again the Republicans are continuing to wreck Washington and the country, this time by blocking the jobs bill.

Finally, if the battle is a battle of ideas, it seems the ideas of the GOP were soundly rejected by the voters by giving the Democrats the largest margin in decades.  Isn't that an even larger failure of the conservative ideals of the last thirty years since Reagan?  If these ideas are so good, why isn't John McCain our President, since we're equating electoral loss with the failure of government?  In this case, we're equating bad poll numbers with the failure of government...so Bush's poll numbers were a complete failure of conservative governance by that logic.  And let's not forget that voters are still pissed at the Republicans in general.  More Americans identify themselves as Democrats even today.  Doesn't this mean that Republicans have failed even worse than Obama?

Evan Bayh left because he couldn't hack it.  He wanted out.  He left at the last moment because he wanted attention.  Your problem,, WSJ Editorial Board, is not with the failure of Obama or even of liberal governance.  Your problem is simply the failure of Evan Bayh, lousy Senator.

Fin.  Exeunt.