Bayh's Lesson: The Left Can't Govern

The media’s just rationalizing when it says Evan Bayh’s resignation is a sign of excessive partisanship or Senate dysfunction. The real reason the government’s at a standstill “is the failure once again of liberal governance,” declares an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. Every time Democrats take control of Washington, they try governing from the left—only to see their policies “hit a wall of practical and popular resistance.”

It happened in the Johnson administration, the Carter administration, and the Clinton administration, and now it’s happening again. Democrats can try to blame “obstructionist” Republicans, but the real problem is that Democrats tried to ram through an agenda that “has foundered on its own overreaching implausibility.” Americans sent President Obama a message by electing Scott Brown. Now Bayh has sent another, but the third, and strongest, will come in November. (More Evan Bayh stories.)