Saying Washington is broken and getting a few shout-outs from the Broder gang is almost de rigueur for middle of the road senators, especially Democrats, when they retire. And it’s hard to disagree with the judgment in general. Watching what’s happened over the last year it’s hard not to believe that something is fundamentally off-kilter in our national government — just not, I think, what Bayh thinks it is. I think the most generous read of Bayh’s decision is simply that he was bored. He just said that his decision was in part because he was “an executive at heart,” which is probably a very honest explanation. He just preferred being governor. And that’s fine. It’s another way of saying he was bored.
But let’s not paper over the fact that he says our national government is broken. And his decision is to walk away.
