Leadership Quote by Birch Bayh

Bayh’s sentence reads like a modest aside, but it’s actually a strategic claim of authorship: he’s not merely commenting on women’s rights, he’s reminding listeners he was in the room, doing the work, building the coalition. “Intimately involved” is carefully chosen. It signals proximity and credibility while skirting the era’s gendered suspicion of men “speaking for” women. He positions himself as an ally with bona fides, not a late-arriving validator.

The real target sits in the middle: “a right wing element in the President’s party.” Bayh refuses to dignify the opposition as the party itself. It’s a faction, a splinter, a malign growth. That rhetorical move is a politician’s scalpel: isolate the extremists, protect relationships with moderates, and frame the struggle as an internal coup rather than a legitimate debate. He’s also protecting the President (almost certainly Nixon-era context) by depicting pressure coming from within, giving the White House an off-ramp: you can stand firm and still keep your coalition.

“Turn back the clock” is the moral engine. It’s deliberately vague, which makes it flexible: it can cover abortion access, the ERA, workplace equality, Title IX-adjacent fights, or appointments to commissions without litigating specifics. Vagueness broadens the audience and heightens the stakes. Bayh casts women’s gains as “time” itself - progress as something natural, reversible only through reactionary meddling. The subtext: if this rollback succeeds, it won’t be a policy tweak; it’ll be a reversion of modernity.