Don't Sh*t Inside the Tent
Somebody made a smelly mess inside the big Democratic tent, but it might not be who you think - a historical, forensic dung analysis.
Democrats 👏 Don’t 👏 Primary 👏 Democrats
“Purity tests don’t win elections.”
“We’ve gotta stop the circular firing squad.”
“Don’t shit inside the tent.”
The progressive left gets a lot of pushback from the Democratic establishment, blame when the party loses elections, grief for “doing the Republicans’ work for them.”
As if the infinitely-resourced GOP aren’t capable of doing their own opposition research? I’d prefer we field candidates on whom such research finds no dirt.
What does it even mean to BE a Democrat? The laws vary from state to state, but in Indiana all it takes to call oneself a Democrat is to have pulled the party’s ballot in the last primary election. Any registered voter can do this. To run for office as a Democrat, you must have “voted blue” in the last TWO primaries.
That’s it.
No statement of principles. No adherence to certain policy positions. No commitment to Democratic values. There is no purity test. Maybe there should be.
The label “Democrat” is meaningless, so vague and broad as to signify nothing. So I reject this notion that, by the very small act of choosing such label, one must be shielded from criticism.
Gimme a break.
Should no Democratic incumbent ever face a primary challenge? That seems awfully undemocratic. Does the very act of putting a ‘D’ next to your name makes you above reproach? Has the “marketplace of ideas” been put out of business?
Pieces of Shit
By this logic, should we not criticize Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, who was indicted on federal corruption charges in 2024 only to accept a pardon from President Trump in December?
What about disgraced New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who was convicted for taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent and sentenced to 11 years in prison?
Across the Hudson, former Democratic Mayor Eric Adams faced federal corruption charges for bribery, fraud, and illegal foreign campaign contributions, only to have the case dropped when he left the party and sidled up to President Trump.
Former Congressman Anthony Weiner is a Democrat. He served 18 months behind bars for exchanging sexually explicit text messages with a 15-year old girl.
I understand Alan Dershowitz was famously a registered Democrat for his entire life until formally leaving the party in 2024. Does he get a pass for his long association with Jeffrey Epstein because he was “on the right team” at the time?
“But Scott, those are men are criminals and louts. Of course THEY’RE not welcome anymore.”
Fine. Let’s widen the scope.
Elephant Shit
Democrats have invited into the big tent with open arms a murderers row of neoconservatives who scurried out of the Republican party when the Trumpists took over. Liberals will point the finger at leftists all day long, yet they didn’t just welcome these GOP turncoats into the big tent, they ushered them right into the center ring.
I welcome their votes, but not their discredited ideas - and I don’t know if I’ll ever see sufficient contrition for the damage they did. These people laid the bricks on the road to fascism then act shocked to have arrived at this destination.
I know far too many liberals who drool over Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger because they broke with their party over January 6th and served as the only two Republicans on the bipartisan committee investigating the treason. Better late than never, I guess, but does that excuse their time in Congress voting with Trump over 90% of the time? All water under the bridge?
Bill Kristol co-founded the Bulwark, a never-Trump conservative publication that has become a go-to source for many Democrats. His old man was the godfather of the neoconservative movement and the younger Kristol perhaps the biggest cheerleader for the disastrous, illegal invasion of Iraq by the George W. Bush administration in 2003. MS-whatever-they-call-it-NOW darling Nicolle Wallace helped Bush craft the lies that led us into that quagmire. Let bygones be bygones?
All those Lincoln Project guys some of y’all fell in love with? Before leaving the GOP, Rick Wilson’s claim to fame was attacking the patriotism of Georgia Democratic Senator Max Cleland - a triple-amputee Vietnam vet - in a 2002 campaign ad, while Schmidt gave us Sarah Palin - solidifying the Republican party's slide into ignorant, racist nationalism.
George Conway? Running for Congress as a Democrat. Began criticizing Trump years ago - but spent the majority of his professional life as a member of the dangerous Federalist Society and as part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” witch hunt against Bill Clinton in the 1990’s.
Are we just supposed to let all that shit slide?
But I won’t contain my ire to rogues and wayward never-Trumpers. Let’s talk about “Democrats in good standing” - lets talk about Clinton.
Gone to Shit
Bill Clinton sucked, but not necessarily for the reasons Conway and company pursued him. And I’m not even gonna get into his sexual improprieties or relationship with Jeffrey Epstein - let’s focus on policy.
Chris Hedges famously said, “the brilliance of Bill Clinton was that he transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party, and he pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane.”
And this, I think, is at the root of my dissatisfaction with the modern Democratic Party.
Now, it wasn’t all Clinton’s fault. The party’s evolution happened over a couple decades. From the Atari Democrats of the late 70’s and early 80’s to the New Democrats of the mid-80’s and beyond, liberals slowly abandoned the New Deal and Great Society principles that built the country’s middle class to embrace “technocratic expertise, individualist solutions to structural problems, growth over redistribution, and development of strong partnerships between public and private sectors, particularly nonprofits, businesses, and foundations” through organizations like the Democratic Leadership Council, or as Jesse Jackson derisively called the DLC, “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”
With his passing the other day, I reflect on what the Democratic Party could have become under Reverend Jackson’s leadership.
But instead, Clinton was the frontman for a new, corporate-friendly version of the party. Thus, when he backed into the presidency, winning an unusual three-way race in 1992, it was seen as proof that this was the way forward. It is ironic that Conway et al spent two full terms trying every underhanded trick in the book to run Slick Willy out of the office, because he turned out to be incredibly effective at implementing conservative policy.
A North American free trade zone was a major plank in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and leaders from the US, Mexico, and Canada began negotiating such an agreement in 1990. Clinton inherited NAFTA, and shepherded it through Congress, signing the business-friendly compact over the objection of organized labor and environmental groups during his first year in office.
Clinton’s fingerprints are all over the expansion of the carceral state and police militarization resulting from the 1994 Crime Bill, the dysfunctional immigration system created by the draconian Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and the same year’s homophobic Defense of Marriage Act, which set back gay rights in this country by 15 years.
Perhaps most consequential to the far-right billionaires’ takeover of all aspects of our lives was 1999’s Financial Services Modernization Act, which repealed important banking regulations enacted during the Great Depression - to prevent another one. Glass-Steagall, passed in 1933, was intended to put a firewall between commercial banks and investment banks. The deregulation led to a Wall Street gambling spree and directly to the global financial crisis of 2008. The Epstein Class scooped up assets on the cheap and now they own nearly everything while average people own next to nothing.
Bullshit
The economic fallout was so severe, such vivid proof of unrestrained capitalism’s failures, that this notoriously racist country said, “fuck it! Let’s see what the Black guy can do.” Barack Obama was swept into power on a progressive message, promising to fundamentally alter this rotten system that had captured both major political parties.
Turns out “hope” and “change” was bullshit.
Obama supported the 2008 bank bailout while still in the Senate and oversaw the administration of the program in office. His government made Wall Street whole, subsidizing bonuses to corporate executives while failing to take care of Main Street, allowing Americans to continue losing their homes.
The Obama administration failed to hold the criminals accountable whose reckless speculation caused the financial crisis, and they also failed to prosecute the war criminals in the George W. Bush administration who lied us into two unnecessary wars and implemented a torture regime, saying “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Furthermore ,the foreign adventurism only continued and expanded, with Obama surging MORE troops to Afghanistan and overseeing a massive expansion of the secretive US drone program that killed nearly 4000 people in multiple countries, including hundreds of civilians.
Even Obama’s signature accomplishment, 2009’s Affordable Care Act, was largely based on ideas first proposed by Republicans in the 1990’s and implemented at the state level in Massachusetts by GOP Governor Mitt Romney. Democrats should have been fighting for a universal single-payer healthcare program like the rest of the industrialized world, but they settled for “market-based” half-measures like the ACA. The most ambitious parts of Obama’s healthcare proposal, a public not-for-profit option that perhaps could’ve kept the private insurance industry honest - and kept premiums from their exponential growth - was scrapped under filibuster threat from so-called “moderates” like Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman and Indiana’s Evan Bayh.
Now, we could continue to talk about the bland centrism of Democrats at the national level and their inadequacy during the Trump era - how Joe Biden repeated his predecessor’s failure to hold a criminal Republican administration accountable, how he promised “nothing will fundamentally change” and certainly delivered on that count, how Kamala Harris campaigned in 2024 that she’d have done “not a thing” differently than her boss - but this is primarily a space dedicated to talking about Indiana politics, so let’s focus on Bayh.
Shit Happens
Evan Bayh is Bill Clinton without the charisma.
He was born in Indiana and spent his early childhood here, but as the son of US Senator Birch Bayh - a real New Deal Democrat who served at a time when the party believed in the power of government to improve people’s lives - he primarily grew up in Washington, attending the elite private all-boys St. Albans School and, after a stint in Indiana to attend IU, headed back east to the University of Virginia, where he earned his law degree. Only returning to the Hoosier State in 1984 to work at his father’s law firm, the younger Bayh ran for Secretary of State in 1986 and - despite a court fight over whether he met the state’s five-year residency requirement to run for the office (the family just can’t shake the carpetbagger allegations - stick a pin in that) - won that race and used that office as a springboard to the governor’s mansion two years later.
Unlike the unabashedly-liberal Birch, a steward of LBJ’s Great Society, Evan Bayh governed in such a manner that even “his Republican colleagues joked that the budget-conscious Democrat should be called a “Republicrat.” He earned praise from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal in 1992, where they touted his record as “one of a genuinely fiscally conservative Democrat.’‘ And though Bayh “was sometimes criticized for being overly cautious and not using his political capital to reach for higher goals,” he leveraged his popularity into a gig delivering the keynote address at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, where President Clinton chose him specifically “because the governor’s record powerfully underscores that this also is no longer his father’s Democratic Party.”
Yeah, well, his father’s Democratic Party created the greatest expansion of the middle class in the country’s history and Evan Bayh’s “New Democrats,” by adopting Reagan’s deregulatory, pro-business economic policies, have only helped destroy it.
Evan leveraged his two terms as governor into a successful run for the US Senate in 1998 and, while there, he continued to advocate for compromise and bipartisanship with an increasingly far-right Republican Party, helping to push the Bush Administration’s “Saddam Hussein has WMDs” lie.
A Pig in Shit
In addition to support for the war, at every step of the way during his Senate tenure, Bayh burnished a reputation as someone who would cross the aisle to help Republicans enact terrible policy and throw up roadblocks to things that might actually help people instead of corporate interests, serving as the chairman of the aforementioned Democratic Leadership Council from 2001 to 2005, joining the Senate Centrist Coalition, helping start the New Democrat Coalition, and founding the Moderate Dems Working Group.
Like Obama, Evan Bayh helped push the Wall Street bailout through the Senate in 2008 and, as we mentioned above, he was one of a handful of Democrats in the Senate who put the kibosh on a public health insurance option during the Affordable Care Act debate.
And, while it’s bad enough he took these positions and cast these votes, the real problem lies in the “why.”
According to Politico, “Bayh raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the financial services industry and Wall Street firms while supporting many of the legislative measures they pushed, including the bailout bill.” He reportedly dined with industry executives and lobbyists ON THE DAY OF THE BAILOUT VOTE.
In 2010, after 25 years working in government, Bayh looked to cash in. He left Hoosier Democrats in a lurch, announcing he would not seek reelection just before the filing deadline. Normally candidates for the job would have been out fundraising and building relationships for months in anticipation of an incumbent’s retirement, but his last-minute withdrawal put the party behind the eight ball, all but prevented a competitive primary, and gave us a nominee completely anathema to the base, thus delivering the seat to Republican Todd young
Then, Bayh spent a substantial amount of his final year in office seeking a cushy job in the private sector, “even as he cast votes on issues of interest to his future corporate bosses.” Between meetings with headhunters for major firms, “joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment […] that would have eliminated billions in tax deductions and exemptions for oil and gas companies” and also helped kill a tax increase on private equity gains (the carried interest loophole). He stayed overnight three times that year at the residence of an executive from private equity firm Apollo Global Management and met twice with CEO Leon Black (yes, that Leon Black, the one from the Epstein files and the multiple rape allegations.)
Within weeks of leaving the Senate, Bayh had been hired to work for Black as a senior advisor at Apollo. Months later he was elected to the boards at investment firm RLJ Companies and petroleum giant Marathon. He became a partner at McGuireWoods, the firm hired in 2012 by Indiana-based medical device manufacturer Cook Group to lobby Congress to repeal the Obamacare medical device tax and wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for the tax to be eliminated. Bayh also lobbied on behalf of nuclear energy providers, went on a speaking tour for the US Chamber of Commerce extolling the virtues of deregulation, and took a gig as a talking head with right-wing propaganda outlet Fox News.
Evan Bayh has made millions in his post-political life working for the worst of the worst, and yet people I know and respect in Indiana politics insist Bayh is “squeaky clean.” Sure, technically he hasn’t done anything illegal, but the cleanest pig in the sty is still covered in shit.
The Shit They Grow Their Money In
Now, it would be bad enough if Evan Bayh had sold out Hoosiers to fatten his own bank account and fucked off to go lie on the beach outside his oceanfront penthouse in Key Biscayne, but his slimy tentacles still reach all the way back home to Indiana.
There’s a saying in Ukraine about how the oligarch class views the rest of the population: “The people are the shit we grow our money in.” Well, Indiana is fertile ground and the Bayh tree is rooted deep.
Despite the fact Evan Bayh spent the better part of the last thirty years living in DC, listing his two multi-million dollar homes in Washington as his primary residences, the Bayh machine’s grip on the Indiana Democratic Party is unrelenting, his ill-gotten campaign war-chest often the only thing keeping an otherwise ineffectual party structure from collapse.
Since his time as governor a generation ago, Bayh loyalists have maintained control of the party. Former Democratic chairs Robin Winston and Ann DeLaney remain power players in their dotage. Dan Parker ran IDP for ten years while Bayh was in Washington, serving as Evan’s “eyes and ears” in Indianapolis and was succeeded by John Zody, who chaired the party for eight years and served under Bayh’s Lieutenant Governor, Frank O’Bannon.
Now, Mike Schmuhl, who chaired the organization from 2021-2025 was the first Indiana Democratic Party chair in a generation who didn’t fall directly off the Bayh tree, though he percolated up through the Joe Donnelly orbit in South Bend. Donnelly was also an ineffectual, corporate “Blue Dog” during his time in Congress and we still have to listen to him prattle on about how HE knows how to win in Indiana because he backed into Senate seat when his opponent revealed how truly extreme he was. Bayh supported Donnelly’s campaign with the maximum allowable contriubtion, stumped with him on the campaign trail, and was right there with Donnelly on the night of his 2012 “victory.” If the Donnelly network is not itself a branch of the Bayh tree, their root systems are deeply intertwined.
Only Karen Tallian, the current INDems chair elected in 2025, does not come directly out of this network, though the State Central Committee who selected her is still rife with longtime Bayh allies - including 5th District Chair Terri Austin and 8th District Chair Dave Crooks. Parliamentarian Brienne Delaney worked on campaigns for both Evan Bayh and current Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett.
Hogsett, now in his third term as mayor of Indianapolis, goes WAY back with Evan Bayh. They worked together at the same law firm in the mid-1980’s, then Joe served as Bayh’s campaign manager on that first run for Secretary of State in 1986 and his subsequent 1988 gubernatorial campaign, assuming the Secretary of State position upon Bayh’s ascendance to the top job. He served as Evan’s chief of staff from 1995-1997 and as party chair from 2003-2004. Bayh lent support to Hogsett’s first campaign for mayor in 2014. After more than eleven years in power, Joe Hogsett commands an impressive Marion County patronage network, sitting on an massive pile of money himself. While the capital city’s infrastructure crumbles, Hogsett goes to bat for real estate developers and assists the Republican General Assembly in their bid to kneecap and privatize Indianapolis Public Schools. Despite this - and multiple scandals involving sexual harassment and impropriety, allegations of substance abuse, and self-dealing by allies, calls for accountability have resulted in the mayor’s sycophants on the city-county council drumming colleagues out of the Democratic caucus.
And when rank-and-file progressives want to do something about it? The machine shuts it down.
Hot Shit
Evan Bayh and Joe Donnelly are 70 years old. Joe Hogsett will join them as a septuagenarian in November. They could ride off into the sunset and live the good life, having sold Indiana for parts - but there’s still copper wiring to be ripped out of the walls. To that end, they’ve been criss-crossing the state, hitting the dinner circuit and going on friendly podcasts to ensure the Bayh family continues to lord over Indiana’s Democratic fiefdom for another generation.
Birch Evans Bayh IV, aka Beau, is looking to follow his father’s path to elected office, running for Indiana Secretary of State, exactly 40 years after Evan won the seat. Also like his father, Beau will have to shake the charge that he’s a carpetbagger.
And it will certainly be hard to dodge accusations that he’s an out-of-touch East Coast elitist when he grew up in DC, attended the same prestigious all-boys private school as his multi-millionaire former-Senator father, went to Harvard for both his undergraduate degree and law school, and gave his big coming-out interview from an empty condo - the same one the family has used to technically maintain an Indiana residence for decades (even though Evan famously couldn’t remember the address) like he just moved here. Bayh only really established residence in Indiana in 2024, when he moved to Bloomington to work as law-clerk for federal judge David Hamilton - himself a member of an Indiana legacy Democratic family.
It’s a big club. And we ain’t in it.
The nepotism is bad enough, but most concerning are the corrupt financial connections. Above, we mentioned Evan Bayh’s 2010 work in the Senate to maintain the carried interest loophole for private equity - and his subsequent lavish gig as a senior advisor at Leon Black’s private equity firm, Apollo Global Management. We also mentioned Black’s sordid personal history. When he resigned as CEO and Chairman of the firm in 2021, Marc Rowan took over the top spot.
Rowan - in addition to maintaining years of ties with Epstein himself - is a notorious Republican mega-donor, giving $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, crafting Trump’s university compact to remake higher education in MAGA’s image, and sitting on Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace,” a UN-rival-in-the-making populated by billionaires and autocrats and tasked with the ethnic cleansing rebuilding of Gaza, if and when Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Israeli government finishes bombing it back into the Stone Age.
Rowan has donated $25,000 to the youngest Bayh’s campaign.
William Oberndorf, another out-of-state billionaire, doubled that, giving $50,000.
Oberndorf is another Republican mega-donor, though he does have a history of giving to certain Democrats - the kind that support school privatization. This guy also make his money in finance, but has made his real life’s work destroying teachers’ unions. He chairs a group called the American Federation for Children, where he took over for founder Betsy DeVos when she was appointed as hatchet-woman Secretary of Education in Trump’s first term. A Californian, Oberndorf has a history of meddling in Indiana politics, having previously donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett and Governor Eric Holcomb and pumping hundreds of thousands into the state through AFC’s Action Fund.
Robert Johnson, media mogul and founder of BET - another billionaire on whose company board Evan Bayh sits - blew all these guys out of the water, giving $300,000 to Beau’s campaign. And he doesn’t get a pass just because he was the country’s first Black billionaire. Johnson has been friends with Donald Trump for years, reportedly turned down a job in his first administration, repeatedly praised Trump’s economic record, and says Democrats have gone “too far to the left.”
Really, Bob? I think we’ve detailed pretty well here how far RIGHT Democrats have gone over the last 40 years - and your buddy Evan Bayh has been along for the whole ride.
And it appears - at least from the folks feeding money into the coal furnace - the Bayh family intends to keep the train moving rightward down the track.
Deep Shit
So, when I get Indiana establishment Democrats sliding into my DM’s expressing disappointment about “attacking our own,” I’ve gotta say, I think we have a pretty goddamn different idea of what constitutes “our own.”
Republicans, since at least the 1870’s, have been the party of big business. And, once upon a time, the ONE tentpole holding up the Democratic canopy was that we fought for the working class. That time as long passed and we now have two corporate parties - one right-wing and one further right.
So spare me the talk of “circular firing squads.” It’s only a circle because half of you are aiming to the left.
“Don’t shit inside the tent?”
Most days it takes a full hazmat suit to still walk in here and call myself an Indiana Democrat.
We can clean up this mess, but we’ve got to dig up the entrenched power structure, root and branch.
Grab your shovels, and let’s get that shit outta here!
This went really long, but it’s excellent. Will restack