First, huge thanks to Spencer for letting me guest-blog again. As he mentioned, I spend most of blog-time at my own joint, but you can also find me hanging around the good folks at PostBourgie.

By now, it’s obvious that Evan Bayh is leaving the Senate because he is angry; angry at liberal activists for criticizing him, angry at President Obama for rejecting him, and angry at the Senate for constraining him. But beyond his anger (and pettiness), it’s clear that Bayh has White House ambitions, and there’s a strong chance that he’ll use the next few years to build support for a primary challenge to President Obama. Here’s Charles Lane on the possibility:

Quitting the Senate was a no-lose move for the presidentially ambitious Bayh, since he can now crawl away from the political wreckage for a couple of years, plausibly alleging that he tried to steer the party in a different direction — and then be perfectly positioned to mount a centrist primary challenge to Obama in 2012, depending on circumstances.

This strikes me as absurd, for two reasons. First, by quitting the Senate when he did — one day before Indiana’s filing deadline — Bayh has earned the lifelong enmity of Democratic activists and donors. From here on out, Bayh will have trouble finding someone in the party to babysit his kids, much less support a primary challenge against the president. Beyond that, Bayh is deluding himself if he thinks that Democratic primary voters are clamoring for more of his Beltway-style “centrism,” which consists mostly of tax cuts for the privileged, slavish devotion to corporate interests (along with complete disregard for his constituents) and enthusiastic boosting of aggressive wars against Muslim countries.  I don’t know if Bayh has noticed, but none of these things are terribly appealing to voters in general, much less the people who enthusiastically catapulted Barack Obama — one of the most liberal presidential nominees in a generation — to the White House.

Photo credit: Politico/Associated Press