Pat Bauer saveth the Republicans - so sayeth Nuvo

Nuvo's editorial this week bore the title of Taking back Indiana’s Republican Party. The writer, David Hoppe, finds hope for salvaging Indiana's Republicans in the defeat of the same-sex marriage amendment. The person performing the salvage? Pat Bauer.

I find myself agreeing with Hoppe's description of Hoosier Democrats and Republicans. Actually, Hoppe's description was once nothing but conventional wisdom - there was broad agreement between Hoosier Democrats and Republicans; on party just emphasized certain points more than others.

This doesn’t mean that some local brand of liberalism is in flower. All Pat Bauer did was to put the brakes on a runaway train. He did for a lot of Republicans what they have been unable to do themselves.

Indiana Republicanism used to be different. This was once a party exemplified by politicians like Robert Orr and John Mutz. These were pragmatic managers who stood for fair play and minding your own business. Their interests were more in line with the haves than the have-nots, but that was because many of them really believed prosperity at the top of society eventually benefited everyone to some degree.

The trouble is in Indiana you can describe Democrats pretty much the same way. To this day, Evan Bayh brags about his success at getting elected in what he calls a Republican state. He tried to use this as a way of selling himself as potential presidential material. But Bayh’s electability here doesn’t make him a new kind of Democrat; it makes him a successful Hoosier politician, a Republicrat. He governed by assiduously protecting the affluent, while convincing many of the rest of us that Indiana didn’t have a problem lower taxes wouldn’t fix. In 1988, he went so far as to hammer John Mutz for being a tax and spender.

Bayh’s success — and his ability to bring much of the state’s Democratic Party with him — pulled the rug out from under Orr/Mutz Republicans by completely blurring the differences between the two parties.

The serpent entered our Hoosier paradise in the form of Eric Miller. Well, I guess he personifies locally what was going on nationally.

After the preceding quote and before the following quote, Hoppe takes to task Miller and Governor Daniels and all is worth reading in full. I do very much like his conclusion:

Ironically, it took a Democrat, Pat Bauer, to reach out to the heads of the state’s largest employers — Lilly, Dow AgroSciences, Emmis Communications, Cummins and WellPoint. Once upon a time this would have been considered the heart of the state’s Republican batting order. One after another, these corporations came forward and testified that writing gay bashing into the Constitution would hurt their ability to compete in a global marketplace.

If the defeat of the constitutional amendment seems a victory for Democrats, it’s really a return to the conservative common sense associated with the middle ground where most of Indiana finds itself most of the time. Thanks to the political cover provided by Pat Bauer, it’s also a chance for old guard Republicans to regroup and take their party’s agenda back. Somewhere, Bob Orr might be smiling.