Dodd may face trouble, but from whom?

2/22/09

Whether he deserves it or not, Chris Dodd will be fine. He's taken a beating for a year, and almost all of it could have been avoided. Whatever his reasons, he hasn't handled his problems with much dexterity. The infuriated reactions from his constituents were entirely predictable.

But as his poll numbers drop and he gets ready to run for re-election next year, he lacks the one factor that could give him real trouble -- an opponent. Without much in the way of a Republican bench, it's hard to think who could step in and give him a real race. And without a viable alternative, he'll cruise to re-election, regardless of his approval ratings.

Plenty of people are exhausted by politics, and have no desire to jump into thinking about 2010 already. The president has barely been in office a month, after all. But this is the time any opponent would have to get a campaign under way, and start the long process of fundraising and building up name recognition.

People who forecast elections for a living have been surveying the field, and say there's nothing to see in Connecticut. Writers for The Washington Post, Roll Call magazine and elsewhere say it's no more than a middle-of-the-pack contest -- not an absolute lock, but nowhere near the most competitive in the country (look to New Hampshire or Ohio for that). Since no more than a handful of Senate incumbents lose most years, Dodd is in good shape.

Surely someone will arise to challenge him, but the possibilities are slim. The Republicans have three recently defeated ex-congressmen running around, but whether any of them would be willing to put his name on the line in what might be a futile cause is unclear. All three of them -- Chris Shays, Rob Simmons and Nancy Johnson -- are out of Congress because the voters rejected them, and are not all that well-known outside their respective districts.

There are Republican leaders in the state Assembly, but they face huge hurdles over name recognition. Senate Minority Leader John McKinney of Fairfield is the son of a former Congress member, but that was two decades ago.

A number of analysts say the only Republican who could give Dodd a real contest is the one who's likely to run away with her own re-election campaign next year -- Gov. M. Jodi Rell. If she has any interest in running for Senate, she's keeping it quiet.

In electoral danger or not, watching Dodd flail about these past few months dealing with questions about his mortgage refinancing deals has been frustrating. It's hard to figure why he couldn't have put all this to rest a year ago by making everything public. Also, his decision to temporarily move his family to Iowa in a quixotic bid for the presidency had predictably negative repercussions. He was elected to serve Connecticut, and people expect him to be here.

He's also emerged, along with Rep. Barney Frank, as a flash point for Republican anger over the economy, but that's hardly his fault. Any Democrat serving as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during this mess would have been vilified.

It's all the more infuriating because his accomplishments are already forgotten. Dodd took unpopular stands against the worst excesses of the Bush years that deserve to be recognized; instead, they've been subsumed by all the unforced errors. He was the most passionate, eloquent voice in the Senate arguing against the idea of granting retroactive immunity to telephone companies that may have broken the law by helping the government eavesdrop on Americans. If they want to be exonerated, let them prove it in court, Dodd reasonably argued.

He lost that battle, but deserves credit for having fought it. Instead, while waiting to find out his opponent, all anyone wants to talk about is his mortgage rate.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. He can be reached at 330-6233 or at hbailey@ctpost.com.