Dan Coats, the anti-Obama

by Chris Cillizza

Washington Post

Former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats said he is running for Senate because of President Obama. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image

Ask Dan Coats why he decided to come out of political retirement to seek the Indiana Senate seat he vacated in 1998 and he offers just two words: "Barack Obama".

"What I saw him doing went against everything I have ever believed, everything I have ever stood for," Coats said in an interview with the Fix earlier this week. "I saw this country in a tailspin under this agenda."

That Coats, a Republican who held a seat in the Senate from 1989 to 1998, would so explicitly run against Obama speaks to the drastic shift in the political winds since the President carried the Hoosier State in 2008. (Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Indiana since Lyndon B. Johnson.)

"He carried [the state] based on this hope and change promise," said Coats. "He carried [it] not on the basis of what he has done the past year."

Coats' surprise entrance in the race -- he decided to run in early February -- against Sen. Evan Bayh (D) was cast by national Republicans as evidence that the favorable national political environment was putting races in play that no one thought might be competitive.

Little did we know that Bayh would stun the political world by retiring less than two weeks after Coats entered the contest, drastically increasing Democrats' vulnerability in the race and raising at least the specter of a Republican Senate takeover.

Coats seemed to be sitting pretty after the Bayh retirement but was taken badly off course by a coordinated -- and devastatingly effective -- campaign by national Democrats to draw attention to his past as a lobbyist and some of his less-than-politic pronouncements, most notably a video that surfaced in which he told a group of North Carolinians that he planned to retire to the Tarheel State.

Coats acknowledged that he got off to a less-than-ideal start, largely due to the fact that he never thought he would be running again for public office. "I wouldn't have said that" if he had been planning a return bid, Coats said of his North Carolina comment. "But I did."

Coats insisted, however, that the charges of nefariousness in his lobbying work (and clients) was entirely off base and boomeranged against the Democrats who made them. "I don't apologize for that," Coats said of his lobbying work. "What they have thrown at me is factually wrong."

Assuming Coats is the Republican nominee -- and he faces a primary fight on May with, among others, former Rep. John Hostettler -- he will work to frame the general election between himself and Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D) in the national political context while Ellsworth will almost certainly try to make the race more local.

That push-pull is present in a number of contested Senate races -- including in places like Colorado, Arkansas and Nevada among others -- where Democratic incumbents are trying to run narrow-bore races focused on themselves and not the national party and their Republican opponents are hoping to turn the contests into a referendum on Democrats in Washington broadly.

"People are distraught over what has happened in Washington," said Coats of the mood in his home state -- adding that he never before seen close to the amount of "anger, fear and engagement" in the electorate at large. "People feel like they were sold a bill of goods," he said.

How much -- and how quickly has the political face of Indiana changed since 2008? Coats is placing a big bet that the change is drastic and that running explicitly against Obama will pay electoral dividends. Democrats have to hope he is wrong.

By Chris Cillizza | March 25, 2010; 1:03 PM ET