When Evan Bayh left the U.S. Senate six years ago, he penned a righteous essay in the Washington Post about how broken the U.S. Senate is. He also sat down for an interview about Washington’s brokenness with a Post blogger in which Bayh expressed his desire “to be engaged in an honorable line of work.”
Then Bayh went to K Street to work for a lobbying firm and a hedge fund.
This summer, when revolving-door Democratic congressman-turned-K Street lobbyist Baron Hill was polling badly in the race to replace Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind. (the Republican senator-turned-lobbyist-turned-senator who is retiring this year), the Democratic leadership worked overtime to convince Bayh to swing back through the revolving door and run again.
Bayh announced his candidacy on Monday, mere hours after Democrats rejected a plank in their platform that would have cracked down on the revolving door.
Democrats in 2016, it seems, are embracing their role as the party of the revolving door.
Here’s Bayh’s Beltway bio in brief:
A former governor of Indiana, Bayh in 1998 won his father’s former seat in the U.S. Senate. Very conveniently for the young Bayh, his father still had a job in D.C. — as a partner at the lobbying firm Oppenheimer, Wolff, Donnelly, and Bayh.
In early 1999, the same time Evan took the oath of office, his father registered his first lobbying clients. In 2001, the senator’s dad moved to K Street giant Venable, where his clients included energy giants Cinergy and Edison Electric, plus Hilton, Marriott, Visa, Lockheed Martin, American Airlines, Bear Stearns, American Airlines, Verizon, Walmart, Hormel and others.
Evan Bayh served two terms as a reliably centrist senator — often supporting big government (when Big Business wanted it) but occasionally taking the free-market position (when Big Business wanted it). He supported the Wall Street Bailout. He supported Obamacare (along with the drug and hospital lobbies) and helped kill a public option (to the applause of industry, as well).
When Coats entered the race in 2010 — which was clearly going to be a very bad year for Democrats — Bayh soon announced his retirement. That’s when he took to the pages of the Post to lament Washington’s dysfunction including the outsized power of “special interests.”
Bayh left the Senate in January 2011, and explained he wouldn’t run for governor in 2012: “While Susan and I prefer Indiana to Washington, D.C.,” he said, “at this time, a statewide campaign would require relocating our children.”
Within three weeks, Bayh announced how he would keep busy in D.C.: He joined Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, as “a senior adviser with specific responsibility for policy issues.”
Bayh wasn’t done. Soon he announced he was joining the K Street lobbying firm McGuire Woods. The firm’s website says Bayh is currently “a strategic advisor to many of the firm’s most significant clients, particularly those whose business goals are impacted by the actions of Congress, the executive branch, or by governors and legislators across the country.”
Unlike his father, Evan never registered as a lobbyist, which means he was not permitted to spend more than 20 percent of his time on lobbying activities.
Bayh is also a director on the boards of Fifth-Third Bank, Marathon Petroleum Corporation, Berry Plastics Corporation, RLJ Lodging Trust and McGraw Hill Education.
In 2015, Evan Bayh then bought a $2.9 million four-bedroom home in Georgetown. “It’s really simple,” Bayh told the Washington Business Journal. “We have twin sons who went off to college last fall, my wife really wanted to downsize, and we didn’t need as much space.”
Bayh does maintain a 996 square-foot condo in Indiana worth $53,000, which is how he justifies running for Senate from Indiana this year.
The timing was perfect for Bayh. Over the weekend, at the Democrats’ platform committee hearing in Orlando, a Bernie Sanders delegate proposed a platform plank reading: “Democrats will support laws that will prohibit public officials from working for the industries they regulate for at least four years after they leave office. We will also support prohibiting lobbyists who work for Wall Street or corporate interests from serving on public boards and regulating agencies that previously regulated them.”
The Clinton delegation killed the amendment.
Notably, the chairman of the platform committee was Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy, who is under investigation for revolving-door action. As the International Business Times reported:
“When Anthem’s plan to acquire Cigna was being negotiated in early 2015, … Malloy appointed Katharine Wade as his state’s insurance commissioner: She was a longtime Cigna lobbyist whose father-in-law works at a law firm that lobbies for the company, whose mother and brother previously worked at Cigna, and whose husband still does. She was also a top official of the major lobbying group for the state’s health insurance industry. As commissioner, she appointed a top deputy who worked at Cigna and she had a former longtime Cigna employee serve as an agency counsel in the merger review.”
Hillary Clinton has said the Democrats are the party of economic mobility. Evan Bayh is the model of such mobility.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
