It wasn't a political story so much as The Adoration of the Bayh Child with the three Magi all wrapped into one Politico national political correspondent by the name of Adam Wren, who's based in Indiana. His article on Friday was "Can a Democratic Dynasty Survive in This Red State?"
The subtitle even casts young Bayh in the role of potential political savior for the Democrats: "A race for statewide office in Indiana could chart the way forward for national Democrats."
This is a beatification of Bayh, a big bowl of fluff. It starts with a jog: "How else would a chiseled, 6’3 ex-Marine and ambitious Hoosier political scion celebrate but with some PT in the deep woods of southern Indiana?" And then we're told "as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear — a fellow red-state Democrat with a family history in politics — recently said on his podcast, he cuts a figure like Captain America.”
The fluff could be tolerable if there were some political substance to the coverage of Beau Bayh, grandson of Senator Birch Bayh and son of another senator from Indiana, Evan Bayh. Instead what is recorded from him is pretty much the empty platitudes you would expect from someone running for high school student body president.
The reader is so besieged by hype-meister fluffery that it is hard to keep from bursting out laughing:
“I’ve even heard people sometimes say he’s so good looking, he almost looks like he’s AI. But there’s no question that Beau looks the part,” says Mike Schmuhl, who managed a presidential campaign for a former Indiana mayor by the name of Pete Buttigieg, and who recently signed on as a senior adviser to Beau.
...Back on the trail, Bayh tears ahead of me on the narrowest of paths. We had planned a run earlier in the fall, but he had sprained an ankle while moving into a new condo. Now, each of his Saucony-shoed footfalls is measured and deliberate.
...On a sweltering day last August, Beau and I stepped up to the sweeping porch at the scenic French Lick Resort, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt whipped support at the 1931 National Governors Association conference for his 1932 presidential bid. We were there for the Indiana Democratic Editorial Association, an annual party confab where candidates convene before November elections and conduct party business by day — and grease relationships by night.
Unfortunately, although Bayh is running for Secretary of State, Wren does not press him on the issues of election integrity such as voter ID, which has somehow become controversial in recent years since many Democrats (and Democrat Secretaries of State) consider it a grave sin to require such identification (looking at YOU, California).
The closest Wren comes to extracting something even slightly controversial from Bayh was about abolishing the Electoral College:
Beau’s grandfather, Birch Evans Bayh Jr., served in the Senate as the architect of not one but two constitutional amendments: the 25th Amendment, dealing with presidential disabilities, and the 26th Amendment, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote. He supported Title IX, barring sexual discrimination and expanding women’s sports. And he championed an unsuccessful amendment to abolish the Electoral College — a goal Beau generally seems to support, even if he can’t make it happen from the office he is pursuing.
“In today’s day and age, I think it makes not as much sense,” he told me. “You have a politics where the person garnering a majority of the popular vote is not ultimately successful. I think that doesn’t make intuitive sense.” Not that he’d be able to topple the Electoral College as a secretary of state. What he could do, he said, is give Hoosiers the chance to back citizen-led ballot initiatives.
And that was it. Not even a question from Wren about if Bayh would support Indiana joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which would essentially bypass the Electoral College by the compact states agreeing to award their electoral votes to the presidential election winner of the nationwide popular vote.
Perhaps Wren can seek those answers for us from young Beau the next time he steps up to a sweeping porch with him on a sweltering day while gazing intently upon his Saucony-shoed feet.
