Loading ...
By BRIAN A. HOWEY
INDIANAPOLIS - When it became clear in early March that the Indiana presidential primary was going to have high impact, we analyzed "Evan Bayh’s predicament" of trying to forge a Hillary Clinton win in a state that had often been hostile to that Democratic family. Howey Politics Indiana conducted this interview with U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh Wednesday afternoon, a day after he helped Hillary Clinton eke out a win in Indiana.
HPI: What were the keys to victory for Hillary last night?
Bayh: Two-fold. This was unlike any other state so far this year. She’s had some good wins, but they were in states where she started off ahead: Pennsylvania by 20; Ohio by 15 or 20; and hung on to win. Here she started off with the Obama strategic memo which ended up in the press back in March, which has been extremely accurate. .jpg){kind=small}
They’ve only missed two states. And they through some demographic analysis predicted they would win Indiana by 7. Interestingly, Hillary’s first poll eight weeks ago had her down by 8. So that was kind of in the same field. She was able to pick up 10 percent and that’s the first time she’s started off behind and come back to win. She had been way ahead in New Hampshire, fell behind for that week after Iowa, but came back to win. She was behind in our state from the get-go. We felt good about it from that standpoint. To move from 10 points back against a formidable opponent who is out-spending you 3-to-1, well, that’s a good piece of work. The keys to victory? It involved the candidate starting with what she stood for, which is that focus on the middle class economic issues. As you know, times aren’t as good as we like in our state. The more anxiety someone had about their economic situation, the better Hillary did. I think that’s because of her focus on the issues that mattered to them — jobs, health care, cost of gasoline, college affordability — but then you combine that with … Barack is a very inspirational figure. He’s a good public leader. She has a different set of positive attributes. Toughness, experience, the ability to deliver results. When times are good people tend to focus more on inspiration. When times are tough, they want to know who can deliver results for me. I think that perception stood her in good stead, particularly where people are facing economic challenges right now. Those are the two key things: Her focus on the economic bread-and- butter issues and the perception that between two good people, she had the right set of attributes to actually get the job done..jpg)
U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh's organization put the gloves on for Hillary Clinton in Indiana. He is introducing her at the Murat Election Night. (HPI Photo by A. Walker Shaw)
HPI: Tell me how the Bayh team integrated with Hillary’s campaign in Indiana? I don’t think she would have won here without you or your team on the ground here.
Bayh: Who knew back in August. Was it August?
HPI: Sept. 23.
Bayh: Who knew that for 40 years we hadn’t had a competitive primary race; who knew this was going to happen. And, frankly, Brian, I’d like to say I hope we can find a way as Democrats, Republicans and Independents to make Indiana matter. It should be like this more often. I think this was good for our state. It was good the nation paid attention to us. It was good that national leaders came to us, understand our challenges. I think it makes it more likely our needs will get addressed. And I hope Repubicans can have this kind of excitement in their primary. It was good for the state of Indiana and it will be good for the Democratic Party in the near term. It’s good for our people in the state. Who knew this was going to happen? It was sometime about eight weeks ago it was apparent that we might actually matter, that we became part of a seamless operation. We were able to guide her people to talk to the right people, go to the right places, say the right things and help them. We were happy to do that.
HPI: How does Hillary Clinton win the nomination from this point on? (Note: Obama is only 177 votes shy of the 2025, she is 327 votes short and there are only 217 remaining super delegates and 261 super delegates).
Bayh: You know, Brian, I actually walked in my front door at 4 a.m. and I turned off the light at 4:30 which is the long way of saying if I sound incoherent, it’s because, like you, I’m not operating on a lot of sleep. I haven’t had a lot of time to think about that. We’ve been so focused on Indiana. We wanted to make sure that we took care of our business at home. Look, she’s got to keep winning states. West Virginia is in a week. I think she has a chance to do well there. Kentucky is a week after that. I think she’s well ahead there. She has to keep winning and we’ll just see how it plays out. I know what the math is and I also know that life and politics are unpredictable. We don’t know what will happen over the next few weeks. Barack has an advantage at this point. You just don’t know what will happen. No. 2, these calls to bring the process to an end have been going on for some time. If those voices had had their way, we wouldn’t have gotten a chance to vote. I know how Hoosiers would have felt about that. Look at these 1.2 million people who voted yesterday. Should they not have had a chance to vote? Could we in good conscience look to our neighbors in Kentucky and say, we’ve done our part, now you should be shut out? Look, we’re Democrats. We vote, we see who wins. We don’t stop the process for temporary political expediency. There’s always a risk that things will get too acrimonious or personal. I honestly don’t think that’s happened so far. Of course there are hard feelings when the candidate you support doesn’t win. But I think when most people catch their breath and focus on the fall campaign will see the real difference between the two candidates. I think most people will come together. That’s how she wins, by taking it one week at a time.
HPI: Gov. Daniels has proposed moving the Indiana primary to the same day as New Hampshire, and using a surcharge on all campaign related items to pay for the election. Is that something you could support? Indiana used to have the first primary.
Bayh: I wasn’t under the impression we gave it up. I was under the impression that everyone started earlier. Yes, that’s the kind of thing we ought to sit down and work together on. This is good for Hoosiers to have a chance to have our say. We absolutely look at that proposal and any other. This is just the first I’ve heard of that proposal. I think he’s exactly right, we ought to find a way to work together to make sure our voices are heard more often than every four decades. These national folks fly over our state and they occasionally stop to pick up some money. They might look out the window and say, ‘I wonder who those people are down there.’ Now they know.
HPI: Will you campaign for Hillary in Kentucky and West Virginia?
Bayh: I don’t have any plans to do that. I may take a breather from politics for a little bit because I’ve got an important day job I want to focus on. When they ask me to do press interviews, that won’t take too much time.
HPI: When you and Hillary took the stage last night, the networks had not projected a winner. The rest of us spent another two hours waiting. You must have seen some internals that said she had undoubtedly won.
Bayh: Yeah, absolutely. Terry McAuliffe and Robby Mook called their numbers guy who apparently has a very good track record and he was confident she was going to win. We didn’t want to run a slight chance that she would go out and declare victory and then have it turn out that it wasn’t so. We had to wait around for awhile.
HPI: Did you realize it got down to 17,000 votes with 72 percent of Lake County still out?
Bayh: We saw that, but we kind of assume. Who knows? Hopefully someone in the journalism world will take a look at some things and report whatever the facts are. I have nothing to say until we know what the facts are. We assumed that the Gary precincts more favorable to Sen. Obama were reported first. It had to be that way, she went from a 40,000-vote lead to 20,000; 88 percent of the vote was in and it went up to 91 percent and 20,000 votes. That’s 3 percent more of the vote was in and she dropped 20,000 votes. So the only way that can happen is if they were overwhelmingly Sen. Obama precincts. We assumed the precincts in Gary had been reported first.
HPI: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you more fired up than your introductory speech last night. Put last night into context with wins in your career.
Bayh: I’ve been blessed to have a number of wonderful evenings. I think I’d put at the top of the list my election as governor for the first time, just because that was something that hadn’t happened in 20 years. But last night was a very good night. I realize there were expectations for me and I like it when people have high expectations and I like to meet them. When we got those first poll numbers eight weeks ago she was behind by 8 percent and I was fortunate that I had some good people who got to work and made it happen.
Tags: Barack Obama, Evan Bayh, Hillary Clinton
Related posts
This entry was written by and posted on May 8, 2008 at 12:41 pm and filed under HPI Weekly. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.