Douthat delivers a political eulogy for Bayh:
His big issue was supposed to be deficit reduction, but you wouldn’t catch him dead proposing anything remotely like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, with its detailed list of programs to be reshaped and reduced. (Bayh preferred the “bravery” of punting the issue to a commission.) On foreign policy, he was a liberal hawk on every vote except the hard ones: He backed the Iraq invasion in 2003 and takes a hard line on Iran today, but in the debate over the surge, when being hawkish was suddenly costly, he sided with the doves. Wherever the Beltway conventional wisdom settled, there was Evan Bayh and he was rewarded for it with endless presidential and vice-presidential chatter, which has followed him, absurdly, even now that he’s announced his retirement.
Ezra Klein calls Bayh "a minor deficit hypocrite."