Evan Bayh was Hillary Clinton’s biggest supporter in the lead-up to the Indiana primary. Will he now be invited to join Barack Obama as his vice-presidential running mate…?

Speculation is intensifying over Barack Obama’s vice-presidential running mate and Bil Browning is predicting that it will be Evan Bayh. As Browning notes in his latest post on the Bilerico Project website, the original post has been picked up by the mainstream media and is now all over the Internet. Browning further predicts that Obama will announce the choice of Bayh on Wednesday in order to get maximum media coverage before the attention fo the country and the world turns to the Olympic Games in Beijing.

“By the time you add in the case for Evan Bayh – foreign policy experience, former Clinton supporter, popularity in the Midwest, not a media whore, experience as a popular former Governor and his youth and good looks – it seems like a slam dunk to me,” Browning writes on Bilerico, citing five reasons for concluding that the junior senator from Indiana will be the choice of the junior senator from Illinois.

I have no inside information on Obama’s choice of running mate or the timing of the announcement, but a good case could certainly be made for Evan Bayh. First, Bayh is young — at 53, only six years older than Obama and nearly 20 years younger than McCain — and attractive, and an Obama/Bayh ticket could recall the dynamic duo of Clinton/Gore, who contrasted with the older and out-of-touch status quo president they were running against, George H.W. Bush.

Second — and this is no small factor — Bayh is white. A white man may be exactly what the first African American presidential nominee of a major party may need as a running mate. Might I add, a boyishly handsome, conventionally gendered, undubitably heterosexual white man.

Third, Bayh has the reputation of being a solid, sensible Democrat, certainly not a left-winger who could make it more difficult for Obama to tack to the center in the final three months of the campaign.

Fourth, Bayh has executive experience as a governor — which is the office he held before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998 — something that Obama lacks. Bayh is the scion of a famous father — Birch Bayh — whose name might still have resonance for older voters.

Fifth, Bayh is close to Hillary Clinton and was her biggest supporter in the lead-up to the Indiana primary, which she won by a slim margin. Having Bayh on the ticket could help further smooth the integration of Clinton supporters into the Obama campaign and could help assuage whatever anger and resentment may still be felt by the Clintons themselves as well as by Clintonistas across the country.

But importantly, while Bayh was a relentless cheerleader for Hillary, he never publicly attacked Obama in the run-up to the Indiana primary, carefully articulating his position as pro-Clinton, not anti-Obama. As far as I know, there is no embarrassing YouTube video of Bayh saying nasty things about his Senate colleague from Illinois.

Sixth, his presence on the ticket could potentially swing Indiana to the Democratic presidential nominee, which would be no small feat. Indiana is a mid-size state with 11 electoral votes, not an insignificant number in what could be a close election. Bayh has won statewide office as governor and then senator in the most Republican state in the Midwest.

The Hoosier State has been reliably Republican in every election in recent times except for 1964, when Lyndon Johnson carried it in a landslide election. Moving Indiana from the red column to the blue would make it that much harder for John McCain to win a majority in the electoral college. Just putting Indiana into play would further strain the Republican nominee’s relatively limited resources.

Seventh, Bayh would complement Obama without overshadowing him; and the senator from Indiana would bring with him no trailing spouse problem as Hillary Clinton would.

Eighth, “As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee, Bayh is well-versed and well-respected on foreign matters, which is why Obama chose him to come along on the highly publicized Middle East tour,” notes Vicepresidents.com.

Having said all that, with all the obvious advantages to the choice of Bayh as Obama’s running mate, there are some serious disadvantages as well.

While Bayh wouldn’t overshadow Obama, he can be solid to the point of being stolid. Bayh is not an exciting speaker; he tends to speak in platitudes and generalities and he has never electrified audiences with high-flown oratory as Obama has. While attractive, he is bland and lacking any discernibly distinctive characteristics. One person posting to the Democratic Underground site called Bayh “a boring centrist white guy.”

While Bayh would be racially complementary, he would bring no geographic balance to the ticket as would Tim Kaine of Virginia, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, or even Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. In fact, Obama-Bayh would be the first Illinois-Indiana major presidential party ticket in history if it were to happen.

Bayh probably would not fatally offend any key Democratic Party constituency, but neither is he likely to excite any constituency either, except possibly that of Hoosiers eager to see one of their own elected vice-president — at the very least, to make up for the last Hoosier in that post –the lamentable Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s second-in-command and possibly Indiana’s least distinguished contribution to national government. (One president and four vice-presidents have come from Indiana, the first being Thomas A. Hendricks, elected with Grover Cleveland in 1884.)

There would be rich irony indeed were Evan Bayh to win election to the second highest office in the land: Quayle defeated Birch Bayh in the elder Bayh’s re-election bid in 1980, becoming the first vice-president from Indiana. Birch Bayh himself ran unsuccessfully for president in 1976, and there have been suggestions that his son has been working for years to lay the groundwork for his own run for the White House.

From a progressive political perspective, Evan Bayh’s record in the U.S. Senate is a distinctly mixed one.

On the one hand, for someone commonly described as a centrist, Bayh earned a surprisingly high 95% rating from Americans for Democratic Action for the year 2007, though he got only an 86% from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 2007, the junior senator from Indiana got a 100% rating from the AFL-CIO, the Children’s Defense Fund, and NARAL Pro-Choice America for 2007, (up from only 75% in NARAL’s 2006 rating). Last year, the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law gave Bayh a grade of A, while the progressive Drum Major Institute for Public Policy gave him a B and the right-wing Gun Owners of America gave him an F. And the Family Research Council (a leading religious right organization) gave Bayh only a 14% rating in 2007.

But Bayh’s vote for the Iraq war in 2002 and his being an honorary co-chairman of the Committee to Liberate Iraq — along with Joe Lieberman and John McCain — could prove embarrassing for Obama as he tries to maximize the contrast between his good judgment on Iraq and what he routinely calls McCain’s bad judgement on Iraq.

And in his response to the Congressional Election 1998 National Political Awareness Test questionnaire from Project Vote Smart, Bayh cited some distinctly un-progressive legislative priorities:

“Taxes: Overhauling the tax code to make it flatter and fairer while protecting working families from a tax increase, eliminating the marriage penalty and the estate tax, reducing capital gains taxes in order to stimulate economic growth, and less power and more accountability for the IRS.

“Values: Supporting measures that strengthen our families and communities, including: reducing juvenile crime and drug abuse, moving people from welfare to work, encouraging good parenting and holding fathers accountable for their children, expanding adoption, reducing teen pregnancy by stressing abstinence, among others.”

In addition to ’stressing abstinence’ and advocating a reduction of capital gains taxes, on the same questionnaire, Bayh indicated his support for “broadening use of the death penalty for federal crimes” and “increasing spending to build more federal prisons.”

Admittedly, this questionnaire was completed ten years ago, but none of these positions is likely to excite the base of the Democratic Party to work for an Obama/Bayh ticket, if the Hoosier is the presidential nominee’s choice as running mate, as rumored.

As for LGBT issues, Bayh earned an 89% on the Human Rights Campaign’s scorecard for the 109th Congress (2005-2007), a 75% rating for the 108th (2003-2005), and a 100% for the 107th (2001-2003). Of the seven votes that HRC ranked members of Congress on for those three sessions, Bayh cast a pro-LGBT vote on six of them, failing only to support the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) — formerly the Permanent Partners Immigration Act — that would enable foreign same-sex partners of U.S. citizens to pursue a path to permanent residence.

In contrast, Richard Lugar — the senior senator from Indiana, invariably described as a ‘moderate’ Republican — earned 0%, 13%, and 14% for the 109th, 108th, and 107th Congresses, casting anti-LGBT votes on all seven of the items that HRC identified as important in those three sessions. In 2007, Lugar earned a 45% rating from the ADA, a 50% from the ACLU, and a 71% from the Family Research Council.

Evan Bayh will never excite the base of his party. But he has a legislative record that compares favorably with even relatively moderate Republicans like Dick Lugar or Chuck Hagel, for that matter, or even a conservative Democrat like Sam Nunn. In other words, while Bayh is not likely to be perceived as progressive in political circles in New York or San Francisco or even Chicago, he’s pretty liberal for Indiana — probably about as liberal as one could be and regularly win election statewide in a red state that almost always goes for the Republican in presidential elections.

Evan Bayh could not be described as a leader on LGBT issues or a crusader for progressive political change. But Obama could do a lot worse than picking the junior senator from Indiana as his running mate.