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Come through with an early endorsement? Represent a key constituency? Hail from a critical swing state? It's not going to get you the Vice Presidency, but you might just earn a cosmetic spot on the shortlist.
Apply some makeup, prim, polish—and deliver the contender to the nearest television studio. A little national prominence goes a long way.
For Senator Evan Bayh though, is it possible he's emerged not a beauty but rather bruised? How many times can a would-be shooting star be shot down?
How many times must Evan weep through Cher singing "This is a song—for the lonely…For the broken hearted, battle scarred," wistfully lip-syncing to a cruel world, "When your dreams won't come true, Can you hear this prayer?"
It evidently hadn't been heard before now. Obama's choice of Biden as his running mate makes today's news Bayh's third devastating veepstakes loss in a row: rejected by first by Gore, then by Kerry, now by Obama.
Perhaps Bayh would have an easier go of the news if he weren't so gosh darn doggedly earnest about bolting the Senate. In June he told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that if offered the VP job, "The answer to that is 'Yes,'" a mark of enthusiasm rare for the jockeys used to declaring their interest by disavowing their interest.
He's joked on the same network that the buzz has been "good for [his] ego," but perhaps not. The potentiality of his candidacy was enough to throw Democratic Party liberals into a furor over Bayh's hawkish support of the war in Iraq, focusing on his honorary co-chairmanship of The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a "neo-con group that was formed to propagandize the country into war," as the website TalkingPointsMemo.com put it. A Facebook group with several thousand members cropped up to oppose Bayh. Hometown papers, including the Courier Press and NUVO, derided him as a "do-nothing Senator."
He's been criticized in the national square as "aggressively wrong," "boring," "stiff," "wimpy," "corpse-impersonating," "Kerryesque," "pathetic," "cowering," "whiney," "undistinguished," "a slap in the face," "a charisma drain," "conventional," "mediocre," and a "corporate lackey." And that list is considerably abridged.
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Last Tuesday's Bloomberg article aired perhaps Bayh's dirtiest laundry, slamming a number of conflicts of interest stemming from his wife's many corporate board directorships. Bayh used his position in Congress to help secure tens of millions of federal dollars for WellPoint, on whose board Susan Bayh sits. She's on the board of bank which falls under the regulatory jurisdiction of the Senate Banking Committee of which he's a member. And she's on Emmis's board, the company that published a Bayh memoir that's had lackluster sales seemingly as a favor.
For the Senator who has made caution the overriding principle of his career, it's striking that such an ethical cloud would ever form at all. Last week HPI reported that Obama had assured Bayh that his wife's corporate work wouldn't be dispositive in what was his ultimate rejection. Perhaps. But at very least, Bayh's time in the spotlight drew national attention to the dirt beneath the Senator's fingernails—dirt that, if not for rampant Vice Presidential speculation, would likely have gone unnoticed or passively cast aside by the media. By Washington's standards, Bayh remains pretty clean.
Yet lately you might not know it. All of this criticism has been mostly unique to Bayh; other contenders, including Biden, Tim Kaine, Kathleen Sebelius, Wes Clark, and Bill Richardson faced comparatively little scorn. Without winning the veepstakes, and enduring such sustained disdain, Bayh's play in the 2008 presidential sandbox may have left him permanently handicapped.
Billed a "boring" and "safe" choice this year, he'll struggle to shirk the has-been label in subsequent veepstakes rounds, and his perennial losses as number two have surely undermined any ambitions he may hold for number one.
On his strut down this year's catwalk, Bayh's tripped and might not get back up. Instead, he's stuck in the Senate, where he doesn't want to be, singing a song for the lonely.
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