Some Thoughts About Evan Bayh’s Prospects

Jim Shella reported the following last week:

Barack Obama repeated in Elkhart this week that he won’t confirm anything with regard to his running mate selection process.

Consider this:

A source reports that people from “Washington” arrived at the building that houses the state archives this week. Its on east 30th Street. They are culling through documents left behind when Evan Bayh was governor.

This is real.

I wonder if, in their vetting process, Team Obamassiah is looking into other aspects of Bayh’s background, history, and so forth.

One would assume that they are, and any such vetting must surely include the uncomfortable topic of Evan Bayh’s wife, Susan.

And, no, I don’t mean the bevy of investigations into questionable behavior that surround her actions on the boards of many companies that have benefited from her husband’s votes over the years (see here, here, and here). They reek of the sort of insider good-old-boy dealings that voters weary of “politics as usual” are almost certain to find distasteful.

Those rumors are troublesome and damaging enough to Bayh’s vice presidential prospects all by themselves.

(Read more after the leap)

They’re also not the ones I’m talking about. I mean the bevy of rumors that surrounded the Bayh couple during Evan Bayh’s governorship, whispered things that endure even today among those who served in the legislature or worked in the Statehouse during that time.

Those rumors are persistent enough that I continue to hear them fairly frequently, which would seem to indicate that they would almost certainly come up in any vice presidential vetting process (and, if they didn’t, they’d almost certainly come up before the election if he was actually chosen).

The stuff you hear from veteran legislators and old Statehouse hands when they talk about Evan and Susan Bayh is sufficient to make me suspect that the Obama people are almost certain to encounter these stories, and they could potentially have an impact on his vice presidential prospects.

They’re not going to find mention of them in some dusty box at the State Archives over on 30th Street, but they’re going to find them more readily from veterans at the Statehouse itself. Reporters are likely to find them, too.

Are they true? I have no idea. But I hear them a lot from Democrats and Republicans, so I’m inclined to think that there’s probably some sort of kernel of fact at the heart of them. Those facts are bound to come up in a thorough investigative process (whether research by those doing the vetting research, the journalistic research, or the opposition research).