Better than Todd Young would, I suspect. The time for interparty fights is in the primary. We’re all pulling the same direction in the general, or at least we should be. I agree with you that whoever comes out of the primary with a D, gets my vote.
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Except that he’s not going to have to even win the primary. From the article:
“Hill, who already won the Democratic primary, announced Monday morning that he that he is dropping out of the race.”
This is basically classic Bayh. Parachuting in after the primary is over and expecting the spot on the ticket to be handed to him.
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Once he votes to organize the chamber, I don’t care if he spends the rest of the term asleep at his desk. We need the votes to get McConnell out of the majority leader post. It’s the difference between Chuck Grassley chairing the Judiciary and Patrick Leahy chairing it. However bad you think his views on some topics are, I promise you that Young’s are worse.
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Ohio-based. Screws small businesses and individuals on a regular basis.
Screws students.
Well, good start, I guess.
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Yeah. Hill was the best choice in the primary, because the Democrats assumed they had no shot at the seat. Now that they have a shot, they need someone with the name recognition and financial heft to take it. Hill just doesn’t have that. Look for him to get a pro quo somewhere down the line from the party. Maybe he’ll get the party backing for taking Mike Pence’s job in 4 years
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Google the words, “Howard Dean lobbyist” and see what comes up for 2016.
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I’m all for pragmatism and common sense in these things. All the regulars here know that. But, in this case, I’d almost rather have an open, declared enemy than this back-stabbing false balancing oligarch sock puppet. He’s just a prettier version of Joe Lieberman. He’s one of that tiny handful of people who make me sound like the people I deride as the rainbow farting unicorn-mounted purity cavalry.
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You know that the party had to give Hill SOMETHING to get him to drop out for their preferred candidate after he won the primary. You may well have put your finger on what that something is.
Beautifully worded.
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He’s not that pretty .
But, as I recall, Lieberman was the 50th vote to organize the Senate and make Harry Reid Majority Leader. I’d take that again and live with the rest.
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I’m glad I’m not living in Northern Kentucky and facing the necessity of casting a vote for this hack.
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Your comment can’t be emphasized enough. Yes, some of his “centrist” positions are ugly but he is a D and we need them in the majority.
In addition, the last time Bayh was in the Senate, the Blue Dog coalition had more of a presence. Now, they’re basically gone. To circle back to what I said before, the Warren wing of Senate Dems is stronger now than ever. I don’t think there’s much chance of him having outsized influence in certain matters.
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On the plus side, this means Hillary flat out told him no to VP as his name had been floating and I suspect he thought himself a possible pick. Not a fan of Bayh, but I am a fan of more D’s over R’s in Congress. Flip congress to full Dem control, then we can begin flipping conservative Dems to more liberal ones.
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Amen to that. I’d rather have Birch Bayh on the ticket than Evan, and Birch is 88 this year. Weirdly, Birch has a 34 year old son too. Second marriages are odd things…
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Bayh’s FAR from ideal, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with your thoughts that a smaller Blue Dog coalition means a lesser presence. If anything, with a large blue dog presence you can shop around if you’re one or two votes shy to find a Blue Dog or two with reasonable asking prices for their votes.
If, on the other hand, we have a slim majority and Bayh is a major swing vote then his influence could potentially get quite large. Kind of like how Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman ended up having a lot more pull than they should have during the ACA vote when their votes were needed to get to the 60 necessary to break the filibuster. (Getting the Public Option taken out of the bill.)
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We’re either going to take the Senate by significantly more than 50 votes or we’re not going to retake it at all. And if he’s the 60th vote to break a filibuster, all he’s going to do is fuck us over time and time again, just like Lieberman did.
Lieberman was, at least, instrumental in getting DADT repealed. He did, in fact, have one or two issues where he was genuinely liberal and genuinely committed to making progress, that being one of them. I see no evidence of that virtue in Bayh.
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I agree with everything you said about Bayh, but would you rather have Todd Young in the seat? Because those are the only 2 options here. I can totally see where you’re coming from and if I had my druthers, Bayh wouldn’t be the Democratic nominee. Sadly, I seem to have lost my druthers, so here we are. As an aside, this feels like bizarro world where I’m arguing pragmatism and you’re arguing political purity. 
ETA:
I agree with this too, but even if Bayh doesn’t win, putting the seat in play, particularly with someone that already came in with 9 million dollars in funding, will make the Republicans spend money defending a seat they have no business having to spend money on. Also, people coming out to vote for Bayh, might help drive Indiana into Clinton’s bucket for the Presidency too, and that would be a nice shiny apple in her bag, for sure.
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Without a large® lead in the Senate in 2016, we’ll lose it again in 2018. If you favor anything more than a short term Democratic control of the senate, this is a good plan.
Remember for as awesome as 2016 is for the Democrats, it is almost the exact opposite in 2018 as far as the Senate seats that Rs and Ds have to defend.
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Hill, who already won the Democratic primary, announced Monday morning that he that he is dropping out of the race.
So is there any information on why Hill is dropping out after having won the primary?