{"id":9362,"date":"2006-12-16T11:15:27","date_gmt":"2006-12-16T16:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9362.html"},"modified":"2006-12-16T11:15:27","modified_gmt":"2006-12-16T16:15:27","slug":"obligatory-headline-bye-bye-bayh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/obligatory-headline-bye-bye-bayh\/","title":{"rendered":"Obligatory headline: Bye bye, Bayh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) had, for all intents and purposes, already been running a presidential race for months. He had 15 trained, funded campaign aides<\/a>, and as of a week ago, visited New Hampshire seven times. When Bayh noted two weeks ago that he was poised to create an exploratory committee, his presidential campaign was a foregone conclusion.<\/p>\n

At least, it was<\/i>. Bayh has decided to scrap his plans<\/a> and skip the race.<\/p>\n

Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana will not seek the presidency in 2008, saying he believes the odds of a successful run were too great to overcome.<\/p>\n

“At the end of the day, I concluded that due to circumstances beyond our control the odds were longer than I felt I could responsibly pursue,” Bayh said in a statement Saturday. “This path — and these long odds — would have required me to be essentially absent from the Senate for the next year instead of working to help the people of my state and the nation.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bayh faced very long odds and almost certainly made the right decision skipping the race.<\/p>\n

With this announcement in mind, it occurs to me that the Democratic presidential field may not be quite as enormous as expected. As recently as a few months ago, observers could name at least a dozen sure-fire, practically-already-running, credible candidates who would throw their hats in the ring early in the new year. Former Gov. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), and Bayh were “obviously” running. Except they’re not.<\/p>\n

Who knows, with a little luck we just might be able to keep the ’08 field to single digits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) had, for all intents and purposes, already been running a presidential race for months. He had 15 trained, funded campaign aides, and as of a week ago, visited New Hampshire seven times. When Bayh noted two weeks ago that he was poised to create an exploratory committee, his presidential campaign was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}