Dan Coats is getting pounded by Democrats for not being a "real Hoosier" because he votes and pays taxes in Virginia and has to move back to Indiana to run against Evan Bayh, leasing a house in Indianapolis. "Evan Bayh has an Indiana driver's license; Dan Coats has a Virginia driver's license," says Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker, as if that settles everything.
But Bayh isn't that much of a real Hoosier, either, and not because he, too, had to move back to the state to get his political career started:
On Thursday, Democrats scrambled to respond when the prominent conservative blog FrugalHoosiers.com questioned the legitimacy of a modest condominium, valued at $59,500 that Bayh lists as his Indiana residency.
[. . .]
The condominium is worth much less than the $2 million house where he spends most of his time in Washington, D.C., and the $1.85 million beach house he owns and rents out in Delaware.
When Bayh returns to his home state, he often stays with family in Terre Haute or in hotels while traveling across the state.
Those dollar amounts are symbolic -- Bayh is much more invested emotionally as well as financially in Washington than he is in Indiana. You go to Washington and you get to play with the big boys, and that becomes the center of your universe. You come back to Indiana just because you have to and only when you have to in order to keep your power base shored up. That happens to Democrats like Bayh and Republicans like Mark Souder. Power and influence are powerful drugs.
And Coats has remained an influential insider in Washington, hanging out with the very lobbyists who helped made the government so big (and who profit from its bigness). Now he will move back to Indiana and hang out here just long enough so he can decry big government as a "conservative Republican" so he can go back and play some more with all the other insisders.
Boy, I'm not too cynical today, am I? The problem is not who we send to Washington. The problem is Washington. As long as the federal government is as big and powerful as it is, the people who go there to "change the system" are just as likely to get co-opted by that system. Pick John Hostettler or Marlin Stutzman instead of Coats in the GOP primary and send him to Washington, and you'll see the same thing happen.
