The Indianapolis Star’s Matt Tully titled his Sunday column “Making Sense of Political News Commentary.” In his column, he asks several questions.

Two of them are particularly interesting.

Q: Will Burton survive his primary challenges?

A: The crowded field no doubt helps him. And his once-energized opponents have been quiet of late, with the exception of state Rep. Mike Murphy, a one-man public relations machine. But Burton’s fear of debating his opponents makes clear he sees a serious threat ahead.

Nobody at the Indianapolis Star ever misses a chance to dump on Dan Burton, even at the expense of basic common sense.

A crowded field helps Burton, it’s true.

And the field is so crowded that he doesn’t need to bother to debate any of them.

Dan Burton isn’t avoiding debates with his opponents because he’s afraid of them. He’s avoiding debating them because the challenge to him is so fractured and divided that it can hardly be taken seriously and he doesn’t need to worry about debating them.

When you’re behind, as Burton’s opponents are, you want to debate. When you’re ahead, you don’t need to.

That’s just the way it is. It’s Basic Politics 101. Maybe Matt Tully could see that if he wasn’t trying to spin every mention of Burton to as bad an angle for Burton as possible.

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Q: Did Bayh subvert democracy by dropping out of the race so late?

A: OK, I don’t hear this one posed as a question. It comes more in the form of statements from Bayh’s critics. They insist Bayh played dirty by dropping out so late that no other Democrat was able to file to run in the primary, leaving the chore of picking a candidate to party insiders.

Here’s what I say: Millions of Hoosiers were eligible to run for Senate and had months to collect the signatures needed to be on the ballot. Five Republicans did so. It’s not Bayh’s fault that no other Democrats entered the race — particularly those on the left who have complained about the senator for years.

If you have a column in the Indianapolis Star, why even ask questions in your column and then dodge them in the supposed answer? Why ask the question at all if you don’t intend to even seriously answer it?

Let’s pose the question another way. If Dan Burton (to give one example) had terrified off his primary challengers so that none filed, and then appeared in the Statehouse Rotunda at 11:58 to announce he was not running for reelection so that a chosen replacement could run unopposed in his place by filing at 11:59, would democracy have been subverted? Would the process have been subverted?

A primary is an exercise in democracy; it is not a chore. People that dislike primaries tend to be sorts that don’t trust the people. And since this is a country where the people are sovereign, that tells you something, doesn’t it?

Evan Bayh’s timing ensured that Evan Bayh and his cronies, not Indiana’s Democratic primary voters, would decide who the Democrats would run for that Senate seat. His timing also ensured that other potential contenders, warned off by virtue of Bayh’s dominance of that same Democratic apparatus, would not run at all.

If only personages that complained about Evan Bayh were interested in running for the United States Senate in the wake of Bayh’s departure, Tully’s argument would still be fallacious. But many Democrats were clearly interested in running for the Senate if Bayh was not, and their chances of running were rendered moot by the way Bayh decided to depart. An electorate of hundreds of thousands was replaced with an electorate of 32 insiders and Bayh cronies.

Matt Tully might not have a problem with that. Evan Bayh and some Indiana Democratic Party leaders might not have a problem with that. But in the end, the fact that they don’t have a problem with it says more about them than anything else.