Why Bayh’s exit is very bad news for the Democrats

Peter Beinart writes:

Obama’s general-election win in Indiana [the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won there in over 40 years], along with his victories in North Carolina and Virginia, were central to his claim that he was transcending the red-blue divide, creating a new, less-polarized political map, an enduring Democratic majority of the kind that had been lost when Robert Kennedy was gunned down.

It’s this dream that, for the foreseeable future, Evan Bayh’s retirement likely forecloses. Republicans will probably take the seat, giving them both of the Hoosier State’s seats in the Senate, along with its gubernatorial mansion. Obama’s climate-change agenda is unpopular in Indiana and his health-care reform effort is not faring much better. If a conservative Democrat like Bayh fears he can’t win reelection in the state, it’s hard to imagine how Obama himself can win it again, absent a major shift in economic conditions.

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Jonathan W. writes

Peter Beinart writes:

“If a conservative Democrat like Bayh fears he can’t win reelection in the state, it’s hard to imagine how Obama himself can win it again, absent a major shift in economic conditions”

I fear that Obama is going to instead try for a major shift in the voting electorate, by adding 12 million new Democratic-voting citizens this year before the election. We have to watch for this and fight it.

LA replies:

Even if he could legalize them in the next six months, which given the fate of the health care bill is unlikely, he couldn’t turn them into citizens in the next two years without setting off a revolution, since normally naturalization takes five years from the time a person is admitted as a permanent legal resident. And given the very weak position Obama is likely to be in after this November, that makes it even less likely.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 16, 2010 08:44 AM | Send