Almost always the man in the political middle, Sen. Evan Bayh hopes he can swing President-elect Barack Obama away from left-wing temptations.

Having spent two hours with Obama for a vice presidential interview this summer, Bayh came away thinking the incoming president will look for what works. Yet Bayh knows the liberal wing of his party in Congress may try to pull the new administration leftward.

"He's more of a pragmatist," Bayh said in an Election Day interview with the Star Editorial Board.

When Obama ran the Harvard Law School review, Bayh added, "He picked three members of the Federalist (conservative) Society to be masthead editors." Obama did that not necessarily to make all sides happy, but to have a good publication.

The son of a three-term liberal senator, Evan Bayh burst onto the Indiana political scene 20 years ago and reconstructed a broken-down Democratic Party. A two-term governor, he saw his lieutenant governor, Frank O'Bannon, win two subsequent terms for the top state office. His chief of staff, Bart Peterson, won two terms as mayor of Indianapolis.

Often looking for middle ground between the political parties, Bayh won his father's Senate seat by overwhelming margins, making it on the short list for vice president in the past three presidential elections.

When moderate Democrats looked for a presidential candidate after losing to George Bush twice, Bayh was an obvious choice, but his presidential campaign never got off the ground. He bowed out, endorsing Hillary Clinton instead of Obama. Yet, his number two credentials were strong enough that he wound up as a finalist with Sen. Joe Biden.

Bayh hopes he can now steer his party and new president to the middle, with a focus on common ground issues such as energy independence.

What he thinks would hurt the party would be a immediate turn to left-wing issues -- the expansion of abortion rights or a massive increase in federal spending to redistribute wealth.

Can he persuade fellow Democrats to the middle, after Obama won an overwhelming victory with his clearly liberal political background? "They'll look at history and see the pitfalls that Bill Clinton fell into in his first two years," Bayh said. "You need to start in the center and work out from there.

"He also thinks Obama should add Republicans to his Cabinet, including retaining Robert Gates as secretary of defense.

He says Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar would be a good secretary of state, but he's not sure Lugar would want the assignment at age 76. "You're not your own person any more," he noted. "Who wants to take orders from a 28-year-old in the White House? That is just part of the deal."

Lugar said late this week that he would prefer to remain in the Senate.

Bayh has always seemed to have his eye on the presidency, which his father sought briefly in 1972 and 1976. Now, with Obama in charge of his party and the nation, Bayh may have to settle for an influential Senate career. Yet in 2016, he will be only 60 years old. The time for higher aspirations, if Bayh remains interested, has hardly passed.

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