Should anyone here in Central Texas care that a Democratic centrist from Indiana is abandoning the U.S. Senate, blaming his frustration on political gridlock and dysfunctional government? Maybe not. Then again, in the context of growing alarm over an almost insurmountable debt crisis, maybe so.

Because in the final analysis, that debt crisis could prove as lethal to everyday Americans and their children as any foreign enemy vowing our destruction.

One of our conservative letter-writers, Jerry Willett of Lorena, noted in an epistle a year ago that U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana was one of the good guys: “He is a Democrat and is voting against the budget. I wouldn’t care what party he was from. Why didn’t we have someone like this running for president? He talked about caring about the people who are having to hitch up their belts and that politicians need to do the same thing.”

When Bayh announced his decision this week to quit at the end of his term, fellow Democrats naturally cited Republican obstructionism. We’ll concede that to a point. Few Texas newspapers condemned the actions of GOP leadership more strenuously than we did when everyone from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, part of the old GOP hierarchy, to Sen. Jim DeMint, idol of the Tea Party set, betrayed their fiscal principles and resorted to political gamesmanship in helping kill a special bipartisan commission to aggressively deal with the budget deficit.

But Bayh errs if he blames Republicans. If he’s looking for real culprits, he should consider the leadership of his party, beginning with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a divisive figure who trashed the principles that swept Barack Obama into the White House. Over the course of a year, she helped transform him into one of the most polarizing presidents in our history. Sadly, Obama let it happen, too, by forfeiting control of his agenda to the far-left wing of his party.

While many Americans were horrified at the big-spending programs and tax hikes unveiled, they must have been baffled at how Democrats warred amongst themselves over everything from abortion funding to special favors for labor unions in the health care bill. And with Republicans shut out of most negotiations by Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, they had only to sit back and wait for the coming implosion.

Meanwhile, the very issue that fiscal hawks like Bayh worry about continues to loom. New York Times staff writer Jackie Calmes, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, captured the insanity of the political gridlock in her Page One story Wednesday when she interviewed Republican conservative Alan Simpson about the debt crisis: “There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed. And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

To his credit, Evan Bayh knows where much of the blame lies. His party, after all, has run Congress and the White House this past year and governed resolutely from the left, isolating a center-right nation that had invested real hope in bipartisanship and a new, open way of governing. Earlier this year, Bayh complained to a Wall Street Journal reporter that some liberals in his own party had proven “tone deaf” on fiscal restraint. “For those people,” he said, “it may take a political catastrophe of biblical proportions before they get it.”

He’s right. The problem is, can our nation survive this rapidly approaching storm when our leaders are all talk and no action?