There are some widely circulating rumors in the blogosphere that the
Obama campaign is on the verge of naming Evan Bayh as their VP
candidate.   Hopefully it is not to late to prevent such a shocking and
fatally poor decision from going down.



Bayh is not just a centrist, who might have occasionally gotten himself
on the wrong side of some of the foreign policy issues progressives
care about .  He is all the way over in the Joe Lieberman wing of the
party; that is, he's one of those militant hawks and neoconservative
fellow-travelers who are barely even Democrats at all .  He was a
member of Bruce Jackson's and Randy Scheunemann's Commttee for the
Liberation on Iraq, along with Lieberman, McCain, Bill Kristol, Richard
Perle, James Woolsey and a rogue's gallery of  neoconservative
Republicans.  We're talking here about one of the guys in the black
hats.


Again, the point isn't that Bayh is just one of many Democrats who made the wrong call on Iraq, but weren't in the middle of that debate.   It's that he was an enthusiastic participant in the neoconservative propaganda effort to pull the country into war.  Choosing Bayh would thus thoroughly neutralize what is left of Obama's Iraq
War opposition message, for the duration of the campaign.  Obama might as well say, "I hereby repudiate my 2002 position on Iraq."  The signal this
choice would send would be dreadful, and would deeply compromise and
weaken Obama's message, and even call his fundamental integrity into
question.  Bayh would probably become a major political liability, and the
obvious conflict between the well-established and hawkish Bayh agenda and the purportedly more realist and internationalist Obama agenda
would dog his campaign from now until November.



Neoconservatives got their foot in the door of the Bush administration, and eventually outmaneuvered the Republican foreign policy realists,
by securing some choice appointments when no one was paying close attention.  Now with Gates seemingly succeeding in re-directing the Bush administration
away from neoconservative ideology, the neocons are looking to put their agents in
high places in the next administration.   Bayh is their Trojan horse in the Democratic camp.



For the life of
me, I can't imagine what the Obama people could be thinking here.  I
wonder if Obama is being pressured into this decision by Clinton's team, in a tit-for-tat tradeoff related to the upcoming convention.  Bayh is a Clinton supporter, and
frankly this looks like some weird, last-ditch Clinton gambit or power play to subvert and trash Obama's campaign
and clear the field for 2012.



If Bayh is selected, the first response form progressive and
rank-and-file Democrats will be a short quiet gasp, followed by a brief
moment of stunned silence, and then the biggest progressive backlash
firestorm we have ever seen.  The backlash to a Bayh
selection would make the FISA telecom immunity backlash look like a
day at the beach.   I think Obama's people may not fully appreciate 
what sort of a bomb they are about to set off, because the VP
deliberations have been flying under the radar so far during Obama's vacation,
and with the distractions of the events in Georgia and the Olympics.