Indiana has always been a state with a good stock of vice presidential candidates, and five have served as such. So, it is no surprise that Obama might be considering Senator Evan Bayh. Last week a joint campaign allowed Obama to gauge the “personal and political chemistry between [them].”

Evan Bayh comes from a political family; his father, Birch, was a liberal democratic senator and presidential candidate in 1976. Bayh’s record shows a moderate-to-conservative governor of Indiana from 1988 to 1996 and a senator since 1999.
What he can bring to the Obama ticket is his executive experience and his economic expertise. The fact that he was an early endorser of Mrs. Clinton would also help win some of her supporters to the Obama clan.

He has shown to be a very reliable Democratic voter on social policy and opposed President Bush’s Supreme Court nominees. He held out last spring on voting for new spending in the federal budget, which reflects his fiscal record on cutting taxes in Indiana and leaving the gubernatorial office with a $1.6 billion surplus. He is one of the parties that called for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld resignation and voted against Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state in 2005 because of her role as an architect of the Iraq war.

The one iffy point that might play negatively in his potential nomination as Obama’s vice-president might be his vote in 2002 for use of force in Iraq. Though he admits he regrets such a decision, he justifies it on “the product of personal assurances from George J. Tenet, the CIA director, that Iraq possesses WMDs.

Only Obama and his advisors will decide. In the meantime he seemed to have made a positive impression on those concerned.

PROs AND CONs OF EVAN BAYH AS OBAMA’s VP
By Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn (NY Times 8/12/08)
Abstract by Johana Nadler

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