GOOD BYE TO ALL THAT / THE NEW YORK TIMES OP EDITORIAL ( RECOMMENDED READING )

February 21, 2010

Op-Ed Contributor

Goodbye to All That

By LINCOLN CHAFEE
Providence, R.I.

“I DO not love Congress,” Evan Bayh said last week, announcing that he will leave the Senate in January. I can agree, having served in the Senate from 1999 through 2006, that there are a lot of reasons not to love Congress.

It’s a punishing workload even under the best of circumstances. In a typical morning, I might have shifted gears from a hearing on banking deregulation, to a floor vote on prescription drug benefits, to a committee meeting on clean air legislation, then back to the office to meet with constituents about juvenile diabetes and to take a call from the Republican National Senate Committee chiding me about my fund-raising totals.

In every hearing, I wanted to show that I understood the most arcane details of the issue and had intelligent questions to ask. As a senator, you’re constantly hoping you don’t reveal that you’re only human, stubbing your toe in a way that hands your next opponent a devastating 30-second ad to use against you.

Then there’s the personal cost: Before I left the Senate I never was able to make it to a parent-teacher conference for any of my three children.

There are certainly more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. Early in my tenure, I had a conversation with two colleagues, Bob Smith and Larry Craig, about former Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York. “Did you hear that Al made $10 million in the private sector last year?” Larry asked. We looked at one another and thought, with the pressure to raise money, the long hours and the gridlock, why are we here? Then Larry said, “But Al would still rather be a senator!” Bob laughed and nodded.

They had a point. What makes the office worthwhile are those moments when you have the sense that your work is accomplishing something, and few senators are able to walk away, no matter how much they may bemoan the partisan rancor. Nowadays, though, the precious instances of job satisfaction seem to be all the more infrequent.

So I can certainly understand Senator Bayh’s remarkable decision to leave, but I also suspect that he’s not willing to give up on Washington. When he suggested recently that a third party could be a viable contender for the White House in 2012, my first thought was that he was focused on a future as an independent — and the exciting new avenues for public service it offers.

In 2001, John Zogby, the pollster, told our Republican caucus, “There is a burgeoning centrist third party waiting to be formed.” Either party could make a strategic decision to capture the center, he said, or both could wait for a third party to fill the vacuum.

Barack Obama stood in as a kind of third-party candidate in 2008, with an attractive message of hope, change and a post-partisan approach. He captured that popular, centrist energy for the Democrats.

So far, I’m sorry to say, he’s proving my assertion that Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all. His difficult first year in office can be traced, I believe, to his appointment of the hyperpartisan Rahm Emanuel as the White House chief of staff, and his failure to devise a stimulus bill that could win a single Republican vote in the House. That crucial first test set the tone for the stalemate on health care reform — an issue that should be popular with the American center, and could be, given the right leadership.

With our hopes for a post-partisan era still unmet, I say to Senator Bayh: Welcome to the club of independents who are looking for a better way to serve. Before long, we centrists may even come together to define the third party that Mr. Zogby foresaw in 2001.

It has happened before. In 1856, my former party ran a credible presidential campaign just two years after its founding. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won the White House under that new Republican banner. If my friend Evan Bayh can walk away from the United States Senate and not look back, more power to him. But my guess is, he has a modern-day reprise of the Lincoln victory in mind.

Lincoln Chafee, a senator from 1999 to 2007, is running as an independent for governor of Rhode Island.