Bayh Drops Out of '08 Race

[Ron Burgundy]

U.S. News & World Report - Evan Bayh, the Indiana senator who had been publicly testing the waters for a White House run in 2008 and was seen as leading the pack of moderate challengers to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, announced this morning that he will not enter the race, surprising even many in his political circle.

"The odds were always going to be very long for a relatively unknown candidate like myself, a little bit like David and Goliath," Bayh said in a statement released to the Indianapolis Star early Saturday. "And whether there were too many Goliaths or whether I'm just not the right David, the fact remains that at the end of the day, I concluded that due to circumstances beyond our control the odds were longer than I felt I could responsibly pursue."

As recently as last weekend, Bayh was campaigning throughout New Hampshire.

"I talked to him a day and a half ago and it was full steam ahead," said a source close to Bayh on Saturday morning.

Bayh began the presidential cycle with a hefty $10.5 million, but in a poll last week in which Democratic voters were asked to pick their top presidential candidate, he was tied for sixth, winning just 2 percent support.

"This decision was a culmination of a lot of discussion about what a campaign would look like in this cycle," said Dan Pfeiffer, communications director for Bayh's All America PAC, in an interview early Saturday morning. "You have a few major candidates with 100 percent name ID, and he is starting out with 1 percent."

Pfeiffer said that the prospect of a presidential field with so many celebrity candidates like Clinton and Barack Obama, along with previous national candidates like John Kerry and John Edwards, was unprecedented in recent memory.

Bayh formed a presidential exploratory committee earlier this month and had paid for 50 field staffers to help state-level Democrats in last month's midterm elections, almost all of them in Iowa and New Hampshire, the sites of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus and primary, respectively.

"He was certainly the one with the most skin in the game up to this point, at least in Iowa," said Iowa state Sen. Jeff Danielson in an interview Saturday morning. "He had the most invested and was building a real framework."

Bayh made 19 trips to Iowa and New Hampshire as he weighed a White House run. In recent trips to the key primary states, he promoted the kind of consensus politics and centrist policies he had built his career on, first as a two-term governor of Indiana and, since 1999, as the state's junior senator. He frequently boasted of winning reelection with 62 percent in 2004, even as George W. Bush took his state with 60 percent.

All America PAC's Pfeiffer said the abrupt announcement did not signal a skeleton-in-the-closet type discovery.

"This is a guy who has been thoroughly vetted twice to be a vice presidential candidate," said Pfeiffer, referring to the 2000 and 2004 elections.