RUSH: Well, I continue to be amused here, ladies and gentlemen, watching the left freak out over the resignation of Evan Bayh of Indiana from the Senate. Lee Siegel, one of the lead columnists at The Daily Beast (a senior columnist out there): ‘Evan Bayh’s Shameful Retreat — The perennial veep shortlister bashed Congress in announcing his retirement. What if… he’d taken responsibility for it?’ ‘What a terrible mediocrity this man is. He leaves the Senate he served in loftily spewing contempt for its members’ selfishness and spinelessness, even as he demonstrates those precise qualities in his decision to turn tail and run.’ Evan ‘Bayh seems to have a very different reason for cutting and running than the specter of ignominious defeat. The times demand leaders, fighters, principled tacticians and creative conceptualizers. Bayh’s response? In that case, I’m outta here! …’At a press conference held a few hours later, he added, ‘The people’s business is not getting done.’ In other words, Bayh’s reason for leaving politics sounded exactly like the contemporary voter’s reason for disdaining politics: Congress stinks and the government is dysfunctional. Yet there’s a difference between Bayh and the average voter. Bayh is a professional politician and the nature of politics is fighting uphill battles. … So when Evan Bayh — a golden boy who virtually inherited his Senate seat from his father, Birch Bayh, has never lost an election, and is considered presidential material — presents as the reason for his withdrawal from the Senate the polarized environment and intractable loggerheads of our current politics, you wonder just what kind of politician he has ever been.’ We have some Evan Bayh bites. We have three of them. He was on MessNBC today and question: ‘The New York Post speculating you’re going to run for president in the Democrat primary against Obama. Can you be Shermanesque today, rule that out and say there are no circumstances when you run for president in 2012?’
HOST: (chuckles)
BAYH: — when it came, uh, to making declarative statements. Yes, I will go beyond, uh, General Sherman. Uh, you know, I’ve — I’ve tried that before, as you know, and fortunately I’m back on my medication now and not —
HOST: Uh, heh, heh, heh.
VOICE: So you’ll absolutely rule out there are no circumstances under which you’ll run for president as a Democrat or an independent in 2012?
BAYH: None whatsoever.
RUSH: Back on CNN this morning John Roberts said, ‘You said that you love public service but you don’t like Congress. Well, what’s your assessment? Is Congress, in its current iteration, broken?’
BAYH: We’ve got a lot of good people in Congress but they are trapped in a dysfunctional system. Uh, we need some real reform here because — as I said in your clip — the public’s business is just not getting done — and, uh, at a time of desperate need for our country. So, uh, we gotta vote out the ideologues who are unwilling to accept half a loaf rather than none; and we’ve gotta, you know, vote out the partisans who care more about their political fortunes than the country.
RUSH: Well what the hell are you doing by cutting-and-running? Let me tell you something, folks — and this is essential that everybody understand. He says, ‘The public’s business is just not getting done.’ Au contraire! The public’s business is getting done. The public, by wide margins, wants no part of the Obama agenda. The public by wide margins, now that they see it, don’t want any part of the Democrat Party agenda; and so they are stopping it in whatever way they can. The Democrats… I continue to marvel at this guy talking about gridlock and the lack of bipartisanship. Senator, your party had 60 seats and you still have 59. The only gridlock is on your side of the aisle. Ideologues? We need to get rid of the ideologues? We don’t want half of the Obama agenda, Senator. The people of this country do not want one-tenth of the Obama agenda! That’s what this is all about. The dirty little secret is the people’s business is getting done, and it is remarkable to see. It is heartwarming to see. Here’s Bayh ripping on Obama’s Porkulus plan.
BAYH: Maggie, I would tell you but I don’t know. Uh, I’m going to, uh — what we call in Indiana in basketball I’m going to — play until the — the final — the final, uh, second ticks off the clock and, uh, then think about what’s next. If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.
RUSH: If I could create…? Is the White House going to have a rapid response to this? Retiring Democrat Senator Evan Bayh says not one job has been created in the last six months and he’s going to go try to create a job — just one — in the private sector. How are they going to respond to this at the new rapid response team in the office of Robert Gibbs?