Bayh gets a taste for '08 during an Iowa tour

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It's McCain versus the Clintons

Ostensibly Bayh was in Iowa to be the guest star at fund-raising events for candidates for the state legislature. But he was doing the early cultivation of Democrats that must be done if a contender is to make a strong showing in Iowa’s caucuses, the opening event of the presidential nomination process.

Bayh’s pitch to Iowans was simple and remarkably non-ideological: he has proven five times that he can win in a “red” state – as he demonstrated in 2004, when he won a second term in the Senate.

Arguably he can do the same in some of the other 25 or so states that Democratic presidential nominees Mike Dukakis in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004 gave up without a fight.

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“On the same day the people of my state were voting for George Bush by 21 percent, I’m pleased to tell you they supported my re-election by 24 percent,” Bayh told a crowd Friday night at a United Steel Workers union hall in Des Moines.

“Beating Republicans – even in one of the toughest states in the Union, this is something that I know how to do.”

“I think he’s for real, I like him,’ said Daryl Beall, state senator from Fort Dodge in northwest Iowa.

Also impressed after hearing Bayh Friday night was former state party chairman Gordon Fischer who said Bayh “had a lot of humor, which he hadn’t had previously. He seemed a lot looser, had a lot more energy and passion. I really like how he pivoted from ‘we can bash Bush, but we need to talk about positive solutions. I thought that was cleverly done.”

At each stop Saturday, Bayh passed out a $250 check to each candidate for state legislature and showed Democrats a color-coded map of how he won Indiana in 2004 even as Bush was carrying the state.

“My point simply is this: winning New York or California by more isn’t going to get us where we need to go, it’s winning Iowa” and other Bush states, he told Democrats assembled in the living room of state Rep. Paul Shomshor in Council Bluffs.

On that point he’s irrefutable. Kerry won New York by 1.3 million votes – a nearly 60,000-vote increase over Al Gore’s performance four years earlier. And of course it did Kerry no good at all.

He could have used some of those 60,000 votes in Iowa, which he by lost 10,000 votes.

Not addressed in the weekend meetings: while Bayh has proven Midwestern appeal, his voting record in the past two years has been remarkably similar to that of a 2008 contender whom some Iowa Democrats say would be unappealing in their part of the country, Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Shomshor seemed persuaded that Bayh could expand the Democrats’ Electoral College map. “Gosh, if he’s the nominee he wins Indiana probably and he flips Ohio – that makes the map pretty appealing. I think you would have to say he’d win those two states if he were at the top of the ticket.”

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