Bayh gets a taste for '08 during an Iowa tour

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

SIOUX CITY, Iowa - With the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination well under way here, Evan Bayh showed off the assets that seem to be making him a top-rank competitor for Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses 18 months from now.

During a campaign swing across the state this past weekend, the Indiana senator's mellow demeanor, folksy Midwestern charm and credentials as a governor and U.S. senator gave Bayh threshold credibility with most of the rank-and-file Democrats he met.

But Bayh has something else that’s not an asset, something that gives a reporter a distinct sense of déjà vu: his vote for the Iraq war resolution in 2002.

As voters in Osceola and Sioux City challenged him on his support for the Iraq war, it felt like the fall of 2003 in these same Iowa meeting halls and living rooms where voters confronted another mellow Midwesterner, Dick Gephardt, on the very same issue as he sought the Democratic nomination.

In meeting room and living room: Iraq
In a room at a community college in Osceola where a dozen people had gathered to meet the senator, Carole Waterman told Bayh that her son, a Virginia National Guardsman, had returned from a stint in Iraq. She didn’t want him or anybody else's son to be sent there.

“How are we going to get ourselves out of this morass? Killing our troops, killing the Iraqis, breaking our budget… It makes no sense to me at all,” Waterman told Bayh. “I’m wondering how you feel about that.”

Bayh replied with a long and subdued justification of his vote for the 2002 use-of-force resolution, along with an explanation that he has learned from his secret briefings as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that if U.S. troops withdrew, a civil war and perhaps a regional war would erupt, with Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia plunging in.

“That would be bad for us,” he told Waterman.

She wasn’t buying Bayh’s justification.

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With exasperation in her voice, she said, “I wanted him to say to say we were leaving Iraq tomorrow. At this point, I don’t care if there is a civil war in Iraq, because there already is a civil war.”

The Democrats who show up for these early events are among the state's most politically active.

At a living room event in Sioux City on Saturday night, former Woodbury County chairman Al Sturgeon told Bayh that rank-and-file Democrats still feel “outrage over this incredible debacle in Iraq.”

Calling it “the biggest political and military blunder of my lifetime,” Sturgeon said to Bayh, “I’d like you to explain your vote on the war and why you gave the president a blank check to get us into this disaster.”

Bayh calmly answered that “I wouldn’t cast the same vote today as I did then.” He noted that “the French believed that (there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the Germans believed that, the Russians believed that, everybody believed he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction.”

Bayh said if the Iraqi factions “get their political act together — and we will know this in the next six to eight weeks… if they can form a government… then there’s something to work with there.” If not, then “we’re out.”

Does honest and candid win respect?
Afterward Sturgeon said, “It was an honest answer and I did appreciate the candidness. It’s not a good answer, because there aren’t any good answers.”

He added that although he didn’t know much about potential 2008 contender Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., “I respect anybody who voted against that war, because it was the right vote and it was a tough vote to take.”

Sturgeon indicated that Bayh’s frequent mentioning of his membership on the Intelligence Committee may not be particularly helpful with anti-war voters. “The intelligence was always suspect. You didn’t have to be a member of the Intelligence Committee – all you had to be was an informed citizen to know this intelligence was pretty suspect.”

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