There’s an old line about this town: stick around long enough and you’ll see everything two or three times. Sit with Ed Simcox for an hour and you start to believe it.
Simcox was Indiana’s secretary of state from 1979 to 1987 and has now written a memoir, In the Room (on Amazon — he earned the plug). He’s been a fixture of Republican politics here for sixty years, so when a Bayh turns up on a statewide ballot again — in a scrambled secretary of state’s race, against a long GOP grip on the governorship — the man practically narrates the déjà vu.
I’ll confess my own. I was out back with a cigar the other night running the names — Birch, Evan, now Beau — and half expected Rod Serling to step out of the shadows.
Rewind to 1985. A young lawyer turns up at the firm of Don Tabert, one of Simcox’s closest friends. Simcox calls for a read. “Ed, you’re going to like him. He’s a good guy, he’s serious.” The lawyer was Evan Bayh, who won the secretary of state’s office in 1986 and the governorship in 1988, breaking a twenty-year Republican run. Now his son Beau is on the same ballot, eyeing the same launch pad. “The parallels are striking,” Simcox said — the chief difference being that today’s Democratic Party carries a progressive wing the moderate Bayh model never had to manage.
What he keeps circling back to is a business-school idea: the arc of an organization. Everything rises, peaks, and slides down the far side unless someone reinvents it at the top. “The same is true of political parties,” he said. Four men — Daniels, Pence, Holcomb, Braun — have Republicans on track for 24 years in the governor’s chair. Add a dominant national figure leaving the stage, and historically voters start to itch. He isn’t predicting a turn. He’s noting the shape rhymes.
The most useful stretch, given the week Republicans are having, was about delegates. Simcox chaired 20 state conventions. His warning lands like a shot at the current scramble: delegates aren’t primary voters. “They will not be influenced by the thing that controls politics everywhere else — money.” And the line a few campaign managers should tattoo on their arms: “If a governor or a party endorses a candidate, it almost has the opposite effect. Delegates will not be told by the power structure how to vote. It’s the last vestige of control party people have.”
Set that against Fort Wayne on June 20, where the establishment — Banks, Rokita and a recruited challenger to Diego Morales — has effectively told 1,800 delegates how to vote. If Simcox is right about the species, that’s not a guarantee. It might be the opposite.
“I’ve seen this play before,” he said, “and we’ll see it again on June 20.”
Photo: Carmel Current
