Appearances matter, Senator Dodd

Senator Dodd’s campaign to win back the hearts and minds, and especially the votes, of his Connecticut constituents in time for next year’s election is being waged on many fronts.

He is working hard to be seen as the champion of the consumer and the bane of some of his most generous big business supporters as he shepherds long overdue credit card industry legislation through the Congress.

He is becoming a frequent visitor to Connecticut.

And he has won the coveted endorsement of Joe Lieberman.  Who could ask for anything more?

As we will see, not all of these efforts are necessarily working to the senator’s advantage. His crusade against the loan sharks who dispense credit cards looks very good on the surface, as we are treated almost daily to sound bites from the irate senator vowing to halt these dreadful abuses.  

The question is, what took him so long?  Usurious credit card interest rates aren’t exactly a recent phenomenon.  Nor is the practice of issuing cards to terrible risks, especially students with no credit and no income.  Industry lobbyists, who were especially generous over the years to House and Senate overseers of their businesses like Senator Dodd, successfully killed earlier attempts at reform.  

Taking on the extremely unpopular credit card industry is a winner, but we will have to see how it stacks up against Dodd’s sweetheart mortgage arrangement with Countrywide Financial, the circumstances surrounding the bargain-price purchase of his home in Ireland, his Senate votes that pleased his finance industry contributors and his wife’s newfound prosperity as a $500,000-a-year board member since their marriage.

 An irate Dodd sounded almost as angry at The Hartford Courant as he is at the credit card moguls in a Mother’s Day op-ed piece denouncing the paper for biased reporting not only in its news columns but also on its opinion pages.  Opinion pages are, by definition, biased, but attacking opinion that differs from yours as biased is a venerable tactic.  It is often used by politicians who know that many people, despite the best efforts of the press, do not differentiate between the news and opinion pages.

In his opinion piece, Dodd insisted he was a fair target, but attacking his wife, with her impressive resume, is, well, biased.  The Courant, however, went into a rapid response, using its main opinion venue, the Sunday editorial, to issue a same-day rejoinder.  The paper, which has endorsed Dodd in every previous election, pointed out, as Dodd didn’t, that Jackie Clegg Dodd’s income has increased fourfold since her marriage.  It could have also wondered why this impressive resume — and it is impressive — didn’t attract board recruiters when she was just plain Jackie Clegg.  

Dodd’s more frequent visits with the home folks have not been without the occasional glitch, either.  The visits are now so frequent and so staged, like a rally last week at the Machinist Union’s Hartford headquarters to drum up support for the credit card bill, that they aren’t getting as much coverage in the local press.

An exception was a visit to northwestern Connecticut that would have been more helpful to Dodd if it hadn’t been reported.  Dodd arrived in Cornwall an hour late and left 45 minutes early after taking only prescreened, written questions and by a remarkable coincidence, not one of them dealt with the senator’s ongoing controversies.  Unfortunately, Dodd’s appearance did attract the local press and its coverage of what The Winsted Journal called “last week’s rare sighting of Sen. Chris Dodd in the Northwest Corner†was devastating.    

Then we have the mixed blessing of Joe Lieberman’s endorsement. Lieberman owes a lot to Dodd.  Thanks to his senior colleague, Lieberman may no longer be the most unpopular U.S. senator from Connecticut in Connecticut.  And given Lieberman’s many offenses, from his dogged support for the war in Iraq to his equally dogged support for the Republican candidate for president, Lieberman’s unpopularity was not easy to eclipse.  But Dodd seems to have done it.

In all of this, Dodd appears to have forgotten, or prefers not to acknowledge, that appearances mean so much in politics, especially the appearance of a conflict of interest.  During his long Senate career, Dodd has happily and legally taken millions of dollars from the big businesses he and his Banking Committee are responsible for regulating.  He insists and may even believe that their dollars have not influenced his votes, but no opponent, especially a Rob Simmons or one equally experienced, will ignore those appearances.  

Unlike Lieberman, who ran and won re-election without the Democratic Party, Dodd seems to have retained the strong loyalty of the party and all the organizational support that goes with it.  Even though he’s been business’ boy in the Senate, he also seems to have retained union support, or at least the support of union leaders.

It’s the rank and file, also known as the voters, he’s in danger of losing.

Correction:  In a column last week dealing with many of the presidential Supreme Court appointees since 1933, I didn’t report that Roosevelt appointee Wiley Rutledge had been an Appeals Court judge as well as a law school dean, and I omitted Kennedy appointee Arthur Goldberg.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist.  E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.