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LEGACY, REALITY AND THE FUTURE OF SENATOR EVAN BAYH

THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED

By Pat Colander

From the Summer 2004 Issue

Lake Magazine covers the hottest information on the Lake Michigan area.

The day I found out the world had changed was in December 1996. It was cold with a biting wind but blessedly clear, no high velocity grains of freezing anything pounding you in the face. A not-too-terrible day for winter in Indianapolis.
Kevin Corcoran, my esteemed colleague who now works for the Indianapolis Star but then was the state bureau chief at the newspaper where we both worked, and I headed out across the concrete plain for a meeting with Governor Evan Bayh, on his last day in office — maybe not his official last day in office, but close enough. Kevin, 30-something and having worked in Indy for most of the eight years of Bayh’s two terms, had a relationship of mutual respect with the Governor and the Governor’s people that became apparent right away. For journalists, this is about as good as it gets, because you are inevitably and often going to write things politicians don’t want to read. A good politician hopes that reporters will respect hard work, honesty and integrity. A good reporter hopes the same thing.

Detractors and devotees on and off the record are unanimous: Evan Bayh is a brilliant politician. He is skilled at dealing with the media.

Kevin and I crossed through the rotunda, past the walls of frosted glass doors into a small outer-outer-outer annex of the maze of the Governor’s offices. After a few minutes we were ushered into the office of Fred Nation, who was press secretary at the end of Bayh’s second term and also originally an acolyte of the Governor’s famous father, former senator and presidential candidate Birch Bayh, Jr. He was leisurely setting framed photos, books and files into a cardboard box. Fred Nation looked like an owl crossed with John Chancellor. He and Kevin immediately fell into small talk about Fred’s family and his next job at the Indianapolis 500 Speedway (where he is now an executive vice president). Fred Nation’s alertness and intelligence were so apparent in a short conversation that I’ve never forgotten it. We all shook hands.

We went through an interior hallway and a grand office leading to the grander office of the Governor. These places resemble sitting areas in what used to be private men’s clubs of a certain era, like the Union League in Chicago. The rooms are bathed in history and carefully-orchestrated context, busts of former governors on pedestals, books, big oil portraits of other former governors in gilded frames. There are lots of them; Indiana has been a state since 1816.

No matter what you think about Hoosiers, there is seriousness and power here. And no matter who the governor is, in a place like this the sense of importance is tangible. It’s an epicenter, and on a daily basis, hopes, dreams and whole futures are fulfilled or shattered.

You see dead people.

Governor Bayh was at his desk with his back to the window. Kevin and I sat in angled chairs, and Kevin started asking his list of questions for a wrap-up story he did every year. Evan Bayh is over six feet tall,

athletic and looks like a movie star — he seems to accept this without relish — but his gift is how well he listens. Another aspect of Evan Bayh’s demeanor is that he puts people at ease and makes them

comfortable rather than intimidated. This is subtle, but it goes way beyond simple courtesy. We were offered coffee or water, we probably declined. Then the Governor asked our permission, took an oversize Red Delicious apple out of a paper bag and began

eating it. After a few minutes, a photographer came in and the Governor put the apple aside while he had his picture taken. He gave thoughtful answers

to Kevin’s questions about his administration’s achievements, predictions about Indiana’s future under Frank O’Bannon (who won a close race against a popular Republican Indianapolis mayor) and his plans for taking some time off and practicing law.

Bayh said he wanted to spend more time with

his family, normal enough for a politician, but that statement transformed the conversation. For Evan Bayh, talking about “the boys” — his fraternal twin sons Beau and Nick, officially Birch Evans IV and Nicholas Harrison, born on Election Day the year before — was a metamorphosis. It was like his face exploded with sunshine. Kevin lit up, too. His daughter and first child was born just weeks before. An

animated discussion began, the size of the children, the level of sleep deprivation, the delivery room, the heroic wives and mothers, the phone calls before the rush to the hospital. Evan Bayh had told this story a hundred times already and he would tell it a hundred more times. (Years later, he wrote it down in an autobiography: “I was thirty-nine years old; this was the happiest day of my life,” he concluded.) So

completely, unequivocally and deeply in love with his new children it took me by surprise. His enthusiasm was infectious to Kevin; I felt like an intruder because my kids were already teenagers. Here were two men, both younger than me, smiling, laughing, giddy about the idea of being a Dad.

I knew in that moment the world had changed.

Two other big ideas in the room that day went unacknowledged: Evan Bayh would announce that he was running for his father’s old Senate seat — the seat Birch Bayh lost to Dan Quayle in 1980 — about a year later. All three of us believed he would win that race and he did. Also, all three of us believed that Evan Bayh would someday be President of the United States.

That was my first meeting with Evan Bayh.

INDIANA

Twenty years later, it is difficult for most people to remember how crucial it was when Evan Bayh came back to Indiana to work as a lawyer with the intention of running for Secretary of State in 1985. “It was so exciting when Evan came in. I give him credit for turning the state around after 25 years of domination by the other party. It was his policy that it was about people, not parties, and he would work both sides of the aisle,” says State Representative Earl Harris, a Democrat and an African-American who has a booming, slightly gravelly baritone voice and has served in the General Assembly for his East Chicago/Gary district for 26 years.

“This was very important. This area [Northwest Indiana] was kind of detached north of Route 30, but also south of Route 30. Our roads looked like we were in a different state, they were terrible. Right away, Evan made us part of the interstate system and brought us highway funds. He started looking at how to prepare this state for economic development that has yet to be fully realized. We became a part of something, and that started to open people’s eyes a little bit. People started to use their imagination.”

Evan Bayh was 30 years old when he beat Rob Bowen, the son of a two-term governor (Bowen’s father had moved up the ladder to be Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Health and Human Services), for the secretary of state job. Next he took on Republican Lieutenant Governor John Mutz and in 1988, when he was 32 years old, he won that race with 53 percent of the vote. For six years, he was the youngest governor in the United States.

HIS FATHER

Cynics have always and unfairly dismissed Evan Bayh as just another Al Gore-George Bush-Dan Quayle-Name-Your-Kennedy son of a famous family/progenitor, born with a silver campaign button on his lapel. First of all, the idea of a dynastic, rich and powerful clan manipulating the United States electorate — or even the six million people in Indiana — is pretty far-fetched, as much as Americans seem to love conspiracy theories. The political landscape is littered with the smashed careers of the formerly entitled. Dan Quayle was buried three days after George Bush named him as a running mate, and he never recovered. These big political jobs are not for the faint-of-heart, and society (not just the press) is merciless and fickle.

Which is not to say that Evan Bayh did not make a plan and listen to some good advice when he was young. (Making better plans sooner is something we are all entitled to do; I sure wish I had.) Evan Bayh, actually Birch Evans III, was the third Bayh to have a life in both Indiana and Washington. Evan Bayh was born December 26, 1955, in Shirkieville, Indiana which is near Terre Haute, where Birch Bayh, Jr. was born in 1928, which is near where his father Birch Bayh, Sr. was born in Patricksburg. Bayh Sr. was a lieutenant in World War I who moved to Terre Haute and started teaching at the school that is now Indiana State University. Evan Bayh’s grandfather, Birch Bayh’s father, was Indiana State’s founding

athletic director and legendary basketball referee who moved his family to Washington, D.C., to go to work as director of the public schools’ physical

education department.

When Birch Bayh, Jr., was 12 years old, his mother died of uterine cancer, and the following year his father was called up to be the Air Force colonel in charge of physical fitness for the troops in the China-Burma theater in World War II. Birch Jr. and his

sister, Mary Alice, went to live with their maternal grandparents on the family farm in Shirkieville. Birch Bayh did not return to Washington until 1962, as the junior senator from Indiana. By then, Bayh III (Evan Bayh) was seven years old.

Try to imagine that your father is Bill Clinton. This is not a comparison that Evan Bayh ever made; this is a comparison many people who have been around Senator Birch Bayh, Jr. and Bill Clinton have made. “Birch Bayh, like Bill Clinton, could spend thirty

seconds with you, and during those 30 seconds you felt like there was nothing more important in the world to him than you,” says Washington

political consultant Chris Sautter.

Says Mark Johnson, editor of the LaPorte Herald-Argus, “Birch Bayh was actually more good-looking than Evan and a much more flamboyant, dynamic personality. Evan isn’t as much of a gladhander and schmoozer.” Success came early for Birch Bayh too. In 1955, at the age of 26, he won a seat in the state legislature, and at the end of the session in the spring of 1957 he decided to sell the farmhouse and go to law school at Indiana University (IU). His progress in the General Assembly continued in spite of the fact that he was a Democrat. By 1957 Birch Bayh was minority leader and then Speaker of the House, at 30, the youngest ever. Once he got to Washington Birch Bayh was unstoppable: “he proposed more amendments to the constitution than any other person since the Founding Fathers,” says Chris Sautter. Birch Bayh is generally given credit for

writing the Equal Rights Amendment and getting Title IX passed. He was as comfortable with farmers at pig roasts as he was with steelworkers. (Birch Bayh actually worked as a field hand picking tomatoes for Campbell Soup when he was a teenager.) During his father’s long run in the Senate (1963-1981), Evan attended St. Alban’s in Washington, where Nick and Beau go to school now. Evan Bayh also went to Culver Academy in Indiana during the summer — it’s attached to a small lake — and then went on to IU in Bloomington. Evan worked on three of his father’s political campaigns.

“Those campaigns (even the losing presidential bid in 1976 and the failed Senate reelection campaign in 1980) brought us closer together…To say that I

idolized him would not be much of an overstatement…When my father made another run at the Presidency in 1976, I took off the second semester of my sophomore year at IU to volunteer again. That campaign was a transforming experience…I had

discovered how exhilarating it could be to work for a cause and a candidate in whom you believe.” Evan Bayh wrote about this in his book, A Private Life in the Public Eye, published last year by Emmis Books in Indianapolis around the time that Hillary Clinton’s book came out. As far as I know, nobody has read this book besides me and members of the Bayh

family. Most people don’t even seem to know about it, but that’s a shame because it is interesting, insightful, candid and self-revelatory, totally unexpected.

HIS MOTHER

When Evan writes about his father dropping out of the 1976 presidential race in March, after he

did poorly in key primaries — the candidate field included Carter, Udall, Jackson and others — it’s painful. Evan blamed his mother, who was fighting breast cancer, for his father’s tardiness in entering the race, the reason, he thought, that his father lost. Back at college the following semester he wrote a paper about it. When his mother read it, she “was deeply hurt…To be judged harshly — and inaccurately, I now know — by her son was a

difficult and hurtful thing. She asked me to sit down with her to discuss it, which we did. I can only regret that she didn’t live long enough for me to fully recant my thoughts, but it taught me an important lesson. Words once uttered — even when prompted by temporary emotion — are hard to ever fully take back. And sometimes life doesn’t give you a chance.”

Marvella (Hern) Bayh died in 1978. She was only 46 years old.

“Why does a child die? Why does your mother pass away in the prime of her life with everything to live for? My mom had been very devout, and in the months following her death, I kept a Bible beside my bed at law school and read a passage every night before going to sleep. I kept looking for answers, but eventually I began to believe that there aren’t any answers…”

Some say her death was a defining moment for father and son. The Senate campaign would have been tough no matter what, the Carter administration and the economy were in pitiful shape. Towards the end of the campaign there was a debate between Quayle and Bayh. “It was at the Children’s Museum down in Indy and the whole place was filled up,” says Mark Johnson. “And it was so interesting, Birch Bayh is so smooth, and here is Quayle coming off as this handsome upstart guy. But Quayle won over the audience, he was able to pull it off.”

Dan Quayle got 54 percent of the vote. After that Evan finished law school, did some traveling, worked on a gubernatorial campaign in Indiana and a law firm in Washington, fell in love (in romantic star-crossed detail in his book ending with a proposal in Rome) and married his wife Susan, who was also becoming a lawyer — eventually an environmental lawyer — who in 1994 was appointed by President Clinton to the International Joint Commission dealing principally with environmental issues regarding the Great Lakes. But Susan Bayh is another story.

Birch Bayh never returned to public life, started a law practice in Washington, remarried and had another son, Christopher. Evan says, “Distance and a twenty-five-year age difference have kept the two of us from being as close as I’d like.”

I made several attempts to contact Birch Bayh on the phone and in the mail for this story, but never heard anything. I doubt if it’s personal; nobody seems to be interviewing Birch Bayh. Though members of the Indiana Congressional delegation know that he will return their phone calls, some think it’s too bad he’s not out there being a Democrat. “He probably believes that his time has come and gone and it’s Evan’s time,” says Chris Sautter. “But the public has lost the perspective of somebody who is very knowledgeable. He was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the `70s. I have heard him talk since

9-11 and I think it’s too bad, but I understand why.”

Evan Bayh’s two terms as governor were a resounding success that still echoes today. “My

legacy is that the fundamentals were in place. The fiscal condition of the state, when I left there was a surplus. We went eight years without a tax increase and raised the academic standards. We were a

leading state in welfare to work, built more state parks and achieved higher standards of accountability across the board,” Bayh says.

“Few believed Bayh when he ran for governor as a fiscal conservative, criticizing massive GOP tax hikes of the prior decade. But Bayh showed he could cut government and limit spending,” Kevin Corcoran wrote in 2000, when Bayh was on Al Gore’s short list for vice-president. “He faced his greatest budget challenge in 1993 when he asked the General Assembly to impose a new tax on hospital revenue or increase the cigarette tax to keep the state afloat. The Republican-controlled legislature refused. Instead lawmakers sent Bayh a budget that Bayh claimed would bankrupt the state. So Bayh cut

government even more. He now claims credit for not raising taxes.

“By 1996, Bayh’s last year in office, the budget

surplus had swelled enough for Bayh to negotiate a tax-cut deal with Republicans, much to the dismay of House Democrats who were seeking to reclaim control of the chamber but had been left out of the talks…Bayh’s voter appeal helped ease the pain.”

Good timing helped, too. During Bayh’s administration, casino riverboat taxes brought new dollars from visitors coming from adjacent states, and the launch of the Hoosier Lottery kept ticket buyers from going outside Indiana to gamble.

“He (Bayh) could be feisty,” says Earl Harris. But, his leadership “allowed us to not raise taxes when other states were falling apart.”

“Ultimately,” concluded Kevin Corcoran, “Evan Bayh redefined what it meant to be a Democrat in Indiana.”

CHOCOLATE

CAKE

Isaw Evan Bayh a couple of times when he was running for Senator and on two more occasions after he won, but I never thought he actually looked tired until I saw him the day before Thanksgiving last year, another cold day in Indianapolis. The Senate had been in session until the wee hours of the day before, finally passing the controversial Medicare package endorsed at the last minute by AARP. “You have a long day?” I asked.

“A long week,” he replied, but he smiled. Senator Bayh voted against the bill because he felt it simply “didn’t do enough for our seniors. Some aspects of the benefits were less generous than we currently have as Medicaid.” It was a complex answer because it was a difficult decision. He said: “If anyone can say they can predict how a piece of legislation will turn out, it’s not true. There’s no way of knowing for sure.”

At the top of the list of what he initiated and

supported at the end of last year — including millions to clean up Michigan City Harbor, development of programs and institutions at Notre Dame and homeland security issues relating to the cities and ports — was a transportation bill that would

continue support for $90 million worth of development at the airport on the lake in Gary. The Northwest Indiana economy has been at the mercy of the steel industry, Bayh said, and the way to

diversify the economy is to develop the airport. “It’s the key to the future.”

Bayh’s assertiveness has not been lost on the locals: Gary Mayor Scott King gives Bayh credit for stepping up on this issue. “In particular over the last several years, he has become the leading advocate for investment at the airport.”

“Evan is a strong person as it relates to economic growth,” says Earl Harris. “He’s zeroed in on the

airport because it relates to potential of the state. It’s either going to be a jewel or an albatross.”

Our talk about the business of being the Senator is taking place in a glassed-in private room at the South Bend Chocolate Company on the Meridian circle in Indianapolis. A giant piece of a multi-layered, almost black chocolate, chocolate cake arrives. In the next several minutes the Senator will inhale this like a reverse Houdini, without ever talking with his mouth full. This is astonishing and I figure a good opportunity to get into the personal stuff.

“I detected from the book that you sometimes felt lonely as a child…”

“I had a series of best friends who were surrogate siblings, even though I wish I had one. The twins always have a buddy, ever since they were born, they’ve been very supportive of each other. They are their own people and achievers in individual ways.”

I explain to the Senator we have a mutual friend who knows him as a Soccer Dad. (Anonymously, my friend said, “Evan Bayh is for real about those kids.”)

He is still talking like a Senator — “Athletics is a metaphor about teamwork, doing your best, not mouthing off to the referees, building character…” — but now he’s obviously pleased.

Maybe it’s the cake. Suddenly, he doesn’t look tired anymore.

He’s perky.



VICE-PRESIDENT

Last year, Senator Bayh took himself out of the 2004 presidential contest. He explained: “If I were going to give it my full effort — which is the only way I’d do it — I’d essentially have to reconcile myself to being an absentee parent, not for a period of weeks or months, but for a period of years.”

Vice-President is something else.

In 2000, Bayh was on the short list with John Edwards, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. “Had the vice president asked me to join his ticket, I would have said yes — a decision Susan and I discussed at length. Since vice-presidential candidates aren’t chosen until the party conventions in late summer of the election year, a vice president’s campaign is a relatively short affair, requiring prolonged absence from family for only two or three months.”

Bayh is on the short list again, along with Edwards and Midwesterners Senator Richard Gephardt and Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.

The last week in April the Daily Kos bloggorama had some pithy remarks from young-sounding Democrats. It’s as good a place as any to start when you are in an area where no good information is available:

The chat leader pronounced that it would be Evan Bayh for Veep. “Show Me Dem” commented, “I would be very happy with Bayh, though I think he will turn it down. I have heard multiple times that he is not happy in D.C., and they had to talk him out of running for Governor again and keeping the Senate seat.”

Other bloggers pointed out that Bayh won’t get it because he voted for tax cuts. Another said that his approval rating is 70 percent and he will hold his Senate seat for eternity and it’s at risk if he were to win higher office. (If Bayh were to be elected

vice-president his Senate seat would then be the appointment of the Democratic Indiana Governor Joe Kernan, unless, of course, Kernan loses his

re-election bid to ex-Bush economic advisor Mitch Daniels in November.)

There was much to-ing and fro-ing throughout the 65 posted entries about other candidates and

mathematical probabilities. “Dan Quayle was dumb as roadkill and Bush Sr., ran with him on the ticket anyway. He was there to draw the fundie nut vote. Clearly the VP debate does not matter,” wrote somebody named “easong.”

Easong’s probably wrong — it may matter when you start splitting percentage points in a place like Florida — but no one will know for sure until the polls close on the coast. No one is willing to predict out loud that Bayh would have a shot at carrying his home state for the ticket — nor is Missouri a sure thing for Gephardt. Obviously the Democrats would run better here with Bayh, and a Kerry-Bayh ticket would force the Republicans to spend more money in Indiana, but the last presidential candidate who won the state was Lyndon Johnson in ’64.

“He is youthful, progressive and he comes from the state that has the highest concentration of

manufacturing in the U.S.,” says Dave Gatton, Washington-based lobbyist for Gary, who works with Bayh’s office on a regular basis. “A lot of this campaign is going to be about lost manufacturing jobs, and he can speak to that. If I were a betting person, I would think the vice-presidential candidate would come from the Midwest.”

“It would be good for us if he became Vice-President,” says Earl Harris, laughing. “We would grow at a rate that would be staggering. Evan Bayh does not have a Vernon Jordan, but he plays well with the African-American community. Evan works with all ethnic groups by fixing the mainstream so the mainstream provides opportunity for everyone.”

Outsiders, however, like Evan Bayh’s chances at getting votes. And if you are strictly looking at numbers, it’s a strong case. A couple of months ago, James Ridgeway said from his liberal

columnist perch at The Village Voice in New York: “Evan was a popular governor before becoming Senator, has good looks, and is a member of the top

echelon of the Democratic Leadership Council (the party’s right wing). Evan might rescue the conservative Southern Dems and even bring with him Indiana.”

And conservative National Review columnist John Miller says pretty much the same thing: “This senator from Indiana is a hawk on the Iraq war and a rising star in the Democratic party. He might put his home state in play, but his main appeal would be his youth, energy, and New Democrat credentials.”

And finally, the guy who owns Krupin’s — a delicatessen very similar, but less edgy than Manny’s in Chicago — in Washington thinks that Senator Bayh has great star potential. He’s seen Evan Bayh with his kids.

You see Evan Bayh everywhere right now. He’s at Senate hearings on

prisoner abuse in Iraq or commenting on legislation he’s pushing: to crack down on “hawalas,” funding networks for terrorists; to support an appeal by state governors for help in preparing for biological attacks, and to increase the number of armored Humvees on order at a South Bend plant and bound for the intensifying ground war.

This world is too fast for someone like me to make predictions about the 2004 elections. (Some months ago, I listened to a fascinating journalistic analysis of presidential politics. The speaker/pundit’s prediction was that it would be a Howard Dean/Wesley Clark ticket and he had the numbers to back it up, believe me. He further prognosticated very convincingly that President Bush would be re-elected, but it would be close because it would depend “on luck.”)

I’m going to go with that theory. What will happen to Senator Evan Bayh’s career this year or any other year after that will depend on luck.

And that’s good, because Nick and Beau Bayh are two of the luckiest guys in the world.