The “moderate” “centrist” “deficit hawk” had grown increasingly dissatisfied with a U.S. Senate paralyzed by partisanship. And the source of the “partisanship” was generally said to be liberals, who refused to compromise on literally every single one of their ideals and priorities.

“If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months,” he said at the time. And I guess that statement was meant to demonstrate just how hard it is to “create jobs,” because after saying that, Bayh got a gig as a “senior adviser” for private equity firm Apollo Global Magement and then he followed that up by becoming a lobbyist. That is three jobs he has created, for himself, so far!

Bayh, a self-satisfied amoral charlatan who wishes every day was 9/11, will now pair his high-priced lobbying with television punditry on a channel that will never ask him to disclose who exactly his clients are and what business they have before the government.

He will be a Fox Liberal in residence, and he will say incredibly predictable and stupid things, to Neil Cavuto or whomever, forever. He just did this to upset you (and to enrich himself) so maybe let’s just not give him any more attention, starting … now.

Early reviews are mixed. Specifically, partisans from both sides of the aisle mocked the entire enterprise relentlessly, while the brain-dead nonpartisan press mostly just repeated No Labels’ claims to be representing “the center” or whatever it actually claims to represent. The “radical middle,” said David Gergen (of course). Or, as Morning Joe himself said: “It has nothing to with politics, it has nothing to with ideology, it has everything to do with civility.”

Sadly, civility doesn’t have much of a constituency.

As independence mascot Michael Bloomberg himself acknowledged at yesterday’s event, the only thing standing in the way of the No Labels campaign for nonpartisan cooperation and civility is democracy. When he tried to push for nonpartisan elections in New York, both parties came together to attack his plan, in the sort of display of true bipartisanship that people always say they wish we had more of until it happens.

Honestly, Bloomberg sounds pretty defeatist about the whole enterprise:

“It’s not clear that the average person feels themselves disenfranchised or wants a lot of the things we are advocating,” Bloomberg said. “In the end when you have an independent candidate it is the two major parties that get most of the votes.”

Of course, getting the most votes was something a number of panel participants — hello, Charlie Crist! — have had trouble with.

No Labels is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that refuses to divulge its donors, but a couple of crazy-rich people have been mentioned, and considering that it’s led by longtime Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson and former Bush media guru Mark McKinnon, one can safely assume that the funders behind the organization are the usual gang of terribly wealthy coastal elites from the “Georgetown cocktail parties” and “Upper West Side penthouses” that everyone likes to complain about.

(Oddly, this slick and professional organization blatantly ripped off its logo, apparently without permission.)

Rich self-declared independents, we have been trained to believe, have no ideology. But the ones who support Mayor Bloomberg and fund centrist organizations like this tend to be conservative Democrats — or, more accurately, Calvin Coolidge Republicans. Coolidge was the original reasonable moderate! Silent Cal supported an invisible regulatory state and anti-lynching laws. (Only one of those priorities survived filibusters, of course — a tax cut for the rich has always been easier to get through Congress than protections for a minority group.) And his pro-business policies led to so much growth, for everyone, until … they didn’t, not long after his powerful commerce secretary succeeded him as president.

Much as New Yorkers decided that the richest man in town must also be the city’s wisest leader, the Republicans of the 1920s had financial titan Andrew Mellon running the Treasury Department — the guy knew money, right?

The idle rich can be excused for fantasizing that they’re smarter than everyone else. When times are good they can sometimes even convince voters. But times are not good right now, except for the insanely wealthy, and I can’t imagine that much of the nation will be receptive to either the ripped-from-the-Democratic Leadership Council platform of No Labels or its calls for everyone to just shut the hell up and do what the Serious Centrists want. (“Compromise Begins with Extension of Bush Era Tax Cuts,” according to the No Labels blog.)

Evan Bayh is the perfect embodiment of the fetishization of bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship. In his time in the Senate, he never stood up for anything, right or wrong. Looking back on his tenure, he recalls periods of awful nationwide crises with great fondness.

Bayh, a former Indiana governor who retired from the Senate after two terms, said he had seen the Senate behave in a bipartisan fashion only a handful of times, such as after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

“It may take that kind of exogenous event, that kind of forcing event, to make it happen” again, Bayh said.

Only when America faces an existential threat can both parties put aside their differences and … do horrible, horrible things like pass the USA Patriot Act, decide to topple the government of Iraq, and use billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the institutions that caused the worst global financial meltdown in generations, thus consolidating even more money and power into even fewer and more systemically connected mega-banks.

The existence of No Labels’ Issues page aside, anyone listening to the round-table discussions yesterday would’ve come away with an impression of a group that had no ideas for how to accomplish anything beyond begging everyone to sit down in a room and play nice. Joe Scarborough seemed to be there on behalf of an organization dedicated to ensuring that people are civil to Joe Scarborough. He had some harsh words for bloggers — Cheetos-eating bloggers, in their underwear, in basements — who, we were told, are always attacking Joe Scarborough, because he loves civility so much.

Scarborough and Bayh are self-righteous and sanctimonious enough to make the most dedicated centrist long for the company of Barney Frank and Jim DeMint. But what’s truly depressing is that there exist technocratic centrists who could use the No Labels money to fight for actual policy ideas (besides the usual proposed gutting of entitlements under the guise of “reform”) instead of fighting for Joe Scarborough’s right to never have to be criticized by liberals.

There are a million nonpartisan good-government reforms — specific ideas, not vague platitudes — that could use as much money and attention as this silly project. The No Labels “Election Reform” section, for example, is heavy on sturm und drang about redistricting, but it never mentions instant-runoff voting, or the National Popular Vote compact, or universal voter registration. Everyone complains about gerrymandering; why not try to convince people to expand the size of the House of Representatives? Why not fight to reform drug laws and free nonviolent offenders from prison?

It’s fun to dream of a bunch of millionaires getting together to push for Senate procedural reform — or maybe even the abolition of the Senate itself! — instead of yet another gang of moderates dedicated to crowing about the deficit.

But if the No Labels crowd wanted to actually make headway in solving the problems that they claim partisanship is exacerbating, they’d have to pick solutions to problems facing America today, and then they’d fight and campaign for those solutions — and when you begin fighting for what you believe in, it can be hard to remain “civil.”

Of course, if you make political predictions for a living, you’ll be wrong sometimes. Incredibly wrong. Hilariously wrong. In fact, this is not even the wrongest thing Stu Rotherberg has predicted in the last 10 years. Because in March of 2006, Rothenberg wrote a column forecasting the 2008 presidential race — “The 2008 Race Is On – And the Field Is Smaller Than You Think” — and one name is conspicuously missing.

A selection:

Long shots no longer win presidential nominations. It’s been 30 years since one of the major parties nominated a true long shot for the White House.
[...]
If I’m right that the fundamentals of a presidential race have made it more difficult for long shots to pull off surprise victories, then we already have a pretty good idea who the 2008 White House nominees will be.

The GOP will nominate Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) or George Allen (Va.) or Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The Democrats will nominate Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) or Evan Bayh (Ind.), former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner or former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.). That’s it. The odds are very, very good that two of those seven hopefuls will be on the ballot for president in November 2008. One or two others may be in the No. 2 slot.

The only “out” that I’ll give myself is that if any of these top-tier candidates ends up not running, then that opening could create an opportunity for someone who’s now a long shot to move into the top tier. For example, were McCain to take a pass, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) could potentially fill his slot.

So, if you really, really like Sens. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) or Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), or Govs. Bill Richardson (D) of New Mexico, George Pataki (R) of New York or Arkansas’ Huckabee, don’t be too disappointed when they fall short of winning their party’s nomination. (OK, I’ll admit to being a little uncomfortable including the very amiable Richardson on this list.)

Hah. So if it’s not Bayh, Clinton or Warner, it might be “the very amiable Richardson.”

Democrats should probably beg Rothenberg to predict huge Republican gains in 2012.

B-b-but the deficit! Fun fact: The $100 billion Bayh and his fellow moderates stripped from the original stimulus bill is much less money than the theoretically infinite amount of money that extending tax cuts for rich people, forever, would cost. And just extending them a couple years would still be more expensive than the stimulus as originally conceived, while helping no one find work, because these tax rates have been in effect for years and they have not helped anyone find work yet.

Evan Bayh is why we can’t have nice things.

I see no good reason why the conversion is stuck on extending Bush’s horrible tax rates instead of Democrats actually proposing their own tax plan of, like, adding new tiers for the wealthiest Americans, raising the top marginal rates to Reagan administration levels, and, let’s say, a financial transactions tax — this would be incredibly popular among all Americans who aren’t wealthy pundits or plutocrats! Oh, wait, I know why this hasn’t happened: Because the party has been entirely captured by people so comfortable that they think people making six figures are struggling and millionaires are one more tax cut away from finally creating tens of millions of good-paying jobs.

He goes on to advise the president that all he needs to do now is get the Republican poobahs in a room together and appeal to them to work with him for the good of the country. This solution is always considered common sense among numerous important players and observers, such as George W. Bush:

Blair said Rice has “got to succeed” if she goes to the region. Bush replied: “What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.

And then there’s John McCain:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’”

Easy as can be.

Actually, it’s possible that if Obama agrees to pass the GOP agenda, preferably without as few Democratic votes as possible, they might even agree to help him (although that’s a long shot too.) But short of that, I think the “stop the bullshit” approach isn’t going to get him very far.

It’s not surprising that Halperin is throwing Obama’s campaign promise back in his face. It’s entirely predictable that they would blame him for failing to magically force the Republicans to become different people. But it’s also Obama’s fault for having promised such a thing in the first place. He handed the Republicans the weapon with which to beat him by promising something that required their cooperation. I’m not sure I ever understood that particular approach except that it was a very nice way to use the symbolism of his historic campaign to give the impression that he had powers to do things that ordinary mortals do not have.

But I have to admit that the “he failed to make us cooperate” theme is even more clever than it seems at first blush. Aside from making Obama look like a failure for being unable to deliver Republican votes, it masks another, more important problem: it isn’t just a lack of bipartisanship that caused the gridlock; it is also a lack of partisanship, particularly in the Senate where “centrist” egomaniacs hold Democrats hostage. And by the way, they have been doing so for a good long time. I wrote this back in 2008 during the embarrassing “Unity 08″ boomlet, knowing full well that this was going to be the problem:

David Broder loves David Boren and Bob Kerrey and thinks the country is best served by rabid conservative ideologues and preening Democratic narcissists who lay down for Republicans and fight their own president every step of the way if he wants to enact any kind of progressive legislation. That’s called “getting things done.”

Bayh is complaining about the nastiness of the liberal blogs as his reason for taking his ball and going home, and I think that’s probably a real issue for him. These Democratic Senate egomaniacs are a huge problem and they are being called on it. They see their role in America’s patrician institution as protecting the rightful owners of America from the Democratic rabble that elected them. And so does the elite political and media establishment at large, which in turn protects them. When they are actually held up to scrutiny for playing such a role, they get very angry. How dare anyone, much less the dirty liberal rabble, question their judgment and their integrity. Their response is to leave the field and turn their seats over to a similarly compromised Democrat or a Republican to teach the Democrats a lesson — a lesson which the Dems have so internalized that they reflexively run in fear of offending conservative Democrats without even questioning it.

This isn’t a bipartisan problem, by the way. The owners allow Snowe and Collins off the leash from time to time to provide cover for something that needs to be done to calm the markets. But other than that this band of aristocratic centrists of both parties have but one role to play and that is to thwart the liberal economic agenda and advance conservative initiatives whenever they are needed. The problem is that this game is being publicly discussed and there is now a (small) price to pay — the village media isn’t the only game in town anymore and there are voices that embarrass the poor sensitive darlings when they “follow their conscience” and obstruct progress for ordinary people. This is very upsetting to them.

So, yes, there is a problem with this bipartisan fetish inside the Beltway. The parties and the country are ideologically polarized and this means that politics aren’t a genteel pursuit best decided over scotch and cigars among like-minded nobility. But people must also be aware that these “centrists” are false flag conservatives and any discussion of the partisan make-up of the Senate needs to account for their position as de facto Republicans. It’s much better to wage this ideological war with a proper troop count, knowing which side everyone is really on.

Update: Michael Bérubé has obtained an exclusive dispatch from the bizarroworld reality based community on this subject. If only we could all live there.

Update II: Matthews had on a couple of these corporate “centrists” William Cohen and John Breaux, whining and moping about the horrible people on the left and right who are ruining just everything.

Breaux made this boilerplate assertion:

I would say to the people on the far right and the far left, you don’t represent a majority of the people of this country. And this is a government by a majority. If you become the majority, then you can become the majority view. But you’re not in the majority. We’ll listen to you, but we have to govern and you have to govern from the center.

Does this “center” really have a majority in the Congress? I don’t think so. “The center” as they define it is, as far as I can tell, no more than a quarter of Congress at most, and far fewer if you want to use the legislation proposed this year to measure it. This is a total fallacy. The majority votes for individual politicians for the House and the Senate, they vote for a party’s political platform and for a president. Every politician has to decide for him or herself how to interpret what that means. Automatically rushing to the “center” (defined, by the way, as equidistant between Barack Obama and Michelle Bachman) is a lazy and stupid way to interpret the majority will (and, not incidentally, a very convenient way to keep conservatives in power.)

If what Breaux says is correct, then the Democrats should a pass Barack Obama’s agenda, period. He and Joe Biden are the only individuals in the government a majority of people in this country voted for. (Now, I actually would call him a centrist too, but I’m guessing that Breaux would have been right beside Nelson in torpedoing even the approved tepid, corporate friendly health care plan that finally emerged from months of coddling the handful of bipartisan “centrists” who worked to defeat it.) But then when these Senate narcissists look in the mirror they see a president too, so it’s natural that they would see the true manifestation of the will of the majority as — themselves.