"His name has been dragged through the mud long enough that his poll numbers have deteriorated to the point where people like Simmons, they're circling," said Kenneth Dautrich, a political analyst at the University of Connecticut. "They smell blood." Mr. Dodd has begun to push back, a welcome change to friends and supporters who have found him oddly passive in recent months. But he said he would not obsess over polls and bad press. "I can't become preoccupied by it," Mr. Dodd said in an interview. "If you let that become the prism through which you do everything, you lose yourself. You've got to be who you are." Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic in the 1960's.
Dodd, Facing Opposition, Pushes Back
Dodd, Facing Opposition, Pushes Back
By MARK PAZNIOKAS
Published: March 19, 2009
FARMINGTON
ON a 48-hour swing through Connecticut last weekend, Senator Christopher J. Dodd began acting like a candidate for re-election, staging press events and commandeering a Sunday news show.
A newly aggressive Mr. Dodd was reacting to a spate of bad press and poor polling, including a Quinnipiac University survey showing him in a statistical tie with Rob Simmons, a former congressman who announced his candidacy last week.
His delicate political condition brought him to the University of Connecticut Health Center, which obliged his desire for a health care forum by organizing a celebration of President Obama's order lifting federal restrictions on research involving human embryonic stem cells.
"We all could use some good news," Dr. Cato T. Laurencin, the dean of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, told a small assembly gathered in a subterranean lobby.
Especially Mr. Dodd.
The event here was as much about restoring Mr. Dodd's political health as recognizing the stem cell research under way at UConn and Yale. Dr. Laurencin stood at a lectern that bore the sign "Science Saving Lives. Senator Chris Dodd."
With an approval rating of 46 percent, according to the Quinnipiac poll, the Democratic senator is seen as sufficiently vulnerable for Republicans to actually compete for a chance to oppose him next year, the 30th anniversary of his election to the Senate.
Mr. Simmons, a former three-term congressman from Stonington, opened his campaign last Sunday. State Senator Sam S. F. Caligiuri of Waterbury said he expected to follow. Thomas C. Foley of Greenwich, a major Republican fund-raiser who was a development official in Iraq and ambassador to Ireland, was also weighing a run.
"I understand it," Mr. Dodd said. "I'm a big boy."
Mr. Dodd, who turns 65 in May, has suffered a string of setbacks since ending his presidential campaign on the night of the Iowa caucuses.
His role as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee is putting him center stage in the drama over efforts to bail out Wall Street. Last week, Mr. Dodd was being criticized by Republicans and others for his role in the legislation that allowed federal recovery money to be used for bonuses for A.I.G. employees.
His involvement in long-ago real estate dealings are back in the news, as is his relationship with Edward R. Downe Jr., a friend and benefactor who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in an insider trading case in the early 1990s.
President Clinton granted Mr. Downe a pardon in 2001. Mr. Dodd had written a letter to the president supporting the pardon.
Together, it all threatens to hobble his 2010 run like an arthritic knee.
"His name has been dragged through the mud long enough that his poll numbers have deteriorated to the point where people like Simmons, they're circling," said Kenneth Dautrich, a political analyst at the University of Connecticut. "They smell blood."
Mr. Dodd has begun to push back, a welcome change to friends and supporters who have found him oddly passive in recent months. But he said he would not obsess over polls and bad press.
"I can't become preoccupied by it," Mr. Dodd said in an interview. "If you let that become the prism through which you do everything, you lose yourself. You've got to be who you are."
Changing the subject might be difficult. At Trinity College in Hartford on March 13, Mr. Dodd staged a press event to highlight his proposal to protect consumers from predatory credit card companies, but reporters asked him about the polls and Mr. Downe.
Last Sunday, WFSB-TV's "Face the State" aired a 30-minute interview in which Mr. Dodd renewed his pledge to seek re-election and addressed two recent columns by Kevin Rennie of The Hartford Courant about the senator's dealings with Mr. Downe.
After initially declining an interview request, Mr. Dodd had agreed to appear for the entire program, causing the station to postpone an already-taped appearance by Mr. Simmons and Mr. Caligiuri.
Mr. Dodd said he deplored Mr. Downe's wrongdoing, but he did not apologize for sticking by him as a friend. He also defended his financial dealings with Mr. Downe as falling within Senate ethics rules.
Mr. Dodd acknowledged in recent interviews that in the mid-1980s he joined Mr. Downe in buying a condominium that became the senator's Washington residence, and that Mr. Downe introduced him to William B. Kessinger, a Kansas City businessman who helped the senator buy a home in Ireland 10 years later.
Mr. Dodd later bought out both men's interests.
The senator said that he was speaking about the Downe matter now because he does not want to repeat the mistake he believes he made last year in failing to aggressively respond to a story about favorable treatment he and his wife received from Countrywide Financial on two refinanced mortgages in 2003.
"I think he came across pretty well," said Jonathan Pelto, a former state legislator and political director for the Democratic Party. "It was a real important step in shoring up his base of support."
Christopher Healy, the Republican state chairman, said the senator's two purchases of real estate with the assistance of wealthy friends would play poorly with voters.
Some Republicans said privately that they believed Mr. Dodd would eventually yield the Democratic nomination to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who has an 81 percent approval rating. Mr. Simmons would not say if he would rather face Mr. Dodd or Mr. Blumenthal.
"That's really completely out of my control," Mr. Simmons said.
Mr. Caligiuri took a similar position, though he agreed that Republican strategists see Mr. Dodd as the weaker candidate: "That's the conventional wisdom."
Meanwhile, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee welcomed Mr. Simmons to the race by branding him a supporter of George W. Bush, a tactic successfully used against him in his losing House re-election bid in 2006. Mr. Simmons called the effort stale.
"This race is about the future, not the past. This race is about the 21st century, not the 20th century," Mr. Simmons said. "This race is about doing something to stabilize our economy, create jobs and get America back on track again."
Mr. Dodd, who has no wish to spend the next year discussing old real estate deals, can only hope that is the case.
E-mail: mpazniokas@comcast.net
