The political pendulum has rarely swung farther and faster than it has for Dodd, 64, who has seen his share of ups and downs since his 1975 House election. But he says he cannot enjoy the current spotlight — the circumstances of the financial crisis are too sad. “I would gladly go back to obscurity rather than be in the middle of this,” Dodd said. “It’s just so tragic. It’s no fun to be in a situation where you’re asking for $700 billion.” Under Dodd, the committee has held 65 hearings in 18 months — but nothing like the current crisis. Yet his Democratic colleagues say there is no one they’d rather have at the negotiating table. “It’s not over yet, but I do know this: This is the president’s problem. This is [Treasury Secretary] Henry Paulson’s problem. This is the Republican Party’s problem. And I’m not sure they’re as grateful as they should be to Chris Dodd.” Dodd’s past has not been spotless; most recently, during this year’s Senate debate over a housing bill, he acknowledged having received an enhanced level of customer service regarding his mortgages — “a major credibility hit,” according to his hometown paper, The Hartford Courant — although Dodd denied wrongdoing and has never been charged with any crime. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic in the 1960's.
Dodd: ‘It’s no fun asking for $700 billion’
Dodd: ‘It’s no fun asking for $700 billion’
By J. Taylor Rushing
Posted: 09/30/08 07:53 PM [ET]
A year ago, Chris Dodd found the presidential campaign trail in Iowa as cold as the Midwest winter itself — days of polls in the low single digits, and nights in which he and fellow Democratic candidate Joe Biden were ignored by national media during debates.
But today finds the Connecticut senator and 33-year lawmaker at the center of the struggle to stitch together a massive rescue plan for the U.S. financial markets. Biden, his friend of 28 years, is perhaps a month away from becoming vice president-elect.
The political pendulum has rarely swung farther and faster than it has for Dodd, 64, who has seen his share of ups and downs since his 1975 House election. But he says he cannot enjoy the current spotlight — the circumstances of the financial crisis are too sad.
“I would gladly go back to obscurity rather than be in the middle of this,” Dodd said. “It’s just so tragic. It’s no fun to be in a situation where you’re asking for $700 billion.”
Dodd’s presidential campaign, a week short of a year long, wasn’t much fun, either. A Gallup poll put him at just 1 percent in November 2007, and he landed seventh in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. He dropped out that night, and endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in late February.
“I wasn’t down; I was never up. It’s hard to get down when you’re never up,” he said. “There was all of that single-digit stuff in the polling data. It would probably have been worse, actually, if I had been up and then came down.”
The Democratic takeover of the Senate in November 2006 gave Dodd the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee — a powerful platform from which to push his legislative agenda, which has included notable bills such as the Family and Medical Leave Act as well as legislation on child care, block grants and the Help America Vote Act.
Under Dodd, the committee has held 65 hearings in 18 months — but nothing like the current crisis. Yet his Democratic colleagues say there is no one they’d rather have at the negotiating table.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said Dodd deserves credit for abandoning “the warmth of the Senate for the harsh desert of presidential politics.”
“This is a redemption for him in some ways, because it shows how good he is as a senator, and how important he is for the country,” she said. “For all of us watching him under these circumstances, it reinforces that just because he went out there and didn’t do as well as he hoped in the presidential race, it doesn’t mean he isn’t a major force.
“It’s not over yet, but I do know this: This is the president’s problem. This is [Treasury Secretary] Henry Paulson’s problem. This is the Republican Party’s problem. And I’m not sure they’re as grateful as they should be to Chris Dodd.”
Dodd’s past has not been spotless; most recently, during this year’s Senate debate over a housing bill, he acknowledged having received an enhanced level of customer service regarding his mortgages — “a major credibility hit,” according to his hometown paper, The Hartford Courant — although Dodd denied wrongdoing and has never been charged with any crime.
Dodd’s friendships have also landed him in the tabloids. Long a core element of the close-knit community of Northeastern Democratic Senate veterans, his extra-close friendship with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) brought tales of near-legendary carousing on Capitol Hill in the 1980s, although both were bachelors at the time. Both men married in the 1990s. Earlier this year, on the day the news broke of Kennedy’s brain cancer, pictures of Dodd crying softly at a press conference in a Senate hallway were flashed around the world.
Biden, too, has been Dodd’s close friend for nearly three decades. On the morning that the Delaware Democrat and Foreign Relations Committee chairman was announced as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, he called Dodd’s cell phone at 6 a.m. to share the news. Dodd wasn’t awake, but has kept Biden’s voicemail message ever since.
“I’ve still got it on this cell phone, although I can’t share all the language that he used,” Dodd said. “He’s told me, ‘The only reason you want me to win is so you have the choice of chairing the Foreign Relations Committee.’ ”
Dodd can be a blunt partisan, which wins him little respect on the Republican side of the Senate aisle, but he also has significant stature in the Democratic Conference, which does.
Like Kennedy, he is seen as approachable and reasonable — often partisan, but not governed by blind ideology. The banking and insurance industries, for example, consider Dodd well-intentioned.
“He approaches the issues fairly even-handedly,” said one financial-services lobbyist who works closely with Dodd. “He understands the industry and does what he feels is best and feels is right. Sometimes he’s with us, sometimes he’s not.”
Likewise, leading Republican negotiators on the bailout bill talks speak warmly of Dodd, saluting his affability, if not always his philosophy.
“He’s here to get things done, not to gum things up,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. “He has the respect of everybody in the room, and therefore people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that things are moving in the right way and that he wants to move them in the right way.”
