I was watching Fox News last night and saw Greta Van Susteren interview Evan Bayh.

Long considered one of the Senate’s more moderate Democrats, Bayh announced back in December of 2008, shortly after Obama’s election, that he planned to form a coalition of other Democrat moderates in the Senate that would somewhat resemble the House’s Blue Dog coalition. In the Susteren interview last night, Bayh said he will vote against the current budget bill because this is neither the time nor the place to pass it with so many earmarks (bipartisan ones, by the way; some of them are pet Republican projects).

No one is quite clear on whether any of this will matter, because the bill may have plenty of votes without Bayh and his group. But he and Senator Feingold have urged Obama to veto the bill it if it passes.

This will not happen; of that much I’m certain. Obama has already said he intends to sign it, and launched his administration’s gobbledygook explanation that it all doesn’t signify much—pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, there are no broken promises about earmarks—because, after all, it’s “last year’s business.” Whaaa?

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Bayh interview was his comment that he believes one of the main reasons he has the perspective he does is that he was a governor before becoming a senator, and had to balance a budget. That’s certainly not the only explanation—I would imagine, for example, he’s hearing from his constituents that they don’t like the bill. Also he may really be enjoying the spotlight. But still, I think he’s onto something.

One of the major criticisms of Obama is that he has virtually no executive experience. Obama’s resume is especially thin in this regard. But a great many senators (John McCain was one) are lacking in that area.

I started to look up the resumes of every single Senator, but I got very weary and stopped at number twenty (alphabetical order). Among those twenty, however, there were only three who had been governors. Among the rest there was a smattering of businesspeople and a couple of Attorneys General. But the road to the Senate seems to pass overwhelmingly through the House.

Legislators tend to be career legislators, with previous political experience mostly in the legislature at a lower level (state and/or House) before they become senators. This was certainly true of Obama, who had also barely kept his Senate seat warm before he vacated it to run for President.

You think it doesn’t matter? Generally, it does. But charisma trumps experience nearly every time. Poor Evan Bayh could hardly scare up any support when he ran for president in 2008. In December of 2006 he dropped out of the race, just a little while after he entered it:

[I]t became crystal-clear to Sen. Bayh in New Hampshire last weekend that his candidacy lacks the requisite buzz. While Obama attracted thousands of purring supporters and dominated national headlines, Bayh couldn’t fill a room, and elicited little mention in the press.

A former Governor of Indiana, the soft-spoken Bayh is serving his second term in the U.S.Senate, where he’s earned a low-key profile as a fiscal conservative and a social moderate.

I suspect that Bayh would have made a better president than Obama. Heck, he even supported the Iraq War—a fact that worked against him as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, campaigning as he did at the end of 2006. But Bayh just didn’t—and doesn’t—have that certain something, that spark, that pizazz, the thing that made Chris Matthews’ leg tingle when Obama entered the room. And you know how much we all need pizazz and tingle in our leaders.

I’m being sarcastic here. But in a way I’m not. Because it’s an undeniable and bipartisan truth that that undefinable thing called charisma seems to be important for winning a presidential election.

It’s not that candidates can’t ever win without it—Richard Nixon, for example, was an anomaly since he was remarkably lacking in that quality, as well as several others (although he did have experience; if it weren’t for his paranoia and ethical flaws—big “ifs,” to be sure—he might even have made a fairly good president).

But pizazz usually counts for a great deal in the minds of the electorate. In the case of Obama, it counted for even more.

[ADDENDUM: Why, now it seems as though those moderate Democrats are giving Obama some trouble on card check, one of the worst proposals of the entire Obama administration so far.

Good.]