Dodd faces money woes for next Senate bid

Two years ago, presidential candidate Chris Dodd announced that he wouldn’t be running for the Senate in 2010 but he didn’t mean it.         

He only said it to get the Federal Election Commission to let him use leftover millions from his 2004 Senate race to run for president. (The FEC requires a presidential candidate to say he’s not going to run for the office for which the funds were contributed but doesn’t hold him to it. It’s a very thoughtful rule.)

As things turned out, using up his Senate campaign money was a mistake, Dodd’s second, if you consider the first was his decision to run for president. There was a lot of money involved, $4.7 million, and it went toward the $16 million Dodd raised to attract 1 percent of the Democratic Iowa Caucus before quitting the race and moving his family out of their Iowa home and back to Connecticut.

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Money has never been a problem for Dodd, the favorite son of the securities, investment, insurance and banking industries. Until now.

Bloomberg News reported the other day that Dodd, who routinely raised millions more than he needed for re-election campaigns against token opposition, “finds himself in an unlikely spot....short on cash and bracing for a tough fight.†And that was before the latest Quinnipiac Poll showed Dodd being easily knocked off by any Republican, known or unknown, if the 2010 election were held now.

Dodd would be in good shape, at least financially, if he hadn’t thrown all that money he’d raised to run for the Senate into his dreadful presidential primary campaign. The problem, as Bloomberg reported, is that many of the donors to his presidential quest “are already close to the maximum contribution limits per six-year election cycle†and couldn’t give him much more money even if they wanted to. And some may not want to.

The report might have added that some of Dodd’s most generous supporters aren’t really in a position to give for the very good reason that they (Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns) no longer exist or aren’t exactly desirable (AIG) donors at the moment.

When he ran for re-election in 2004 — and you could say the same when he ran in 1998, etc., etc. — Dodd didn’t really need much money against no-name opponents, but he always raised and spent a lot, just in case, he said. In virtually every race, Dodd was one of those incumbents they refer to as “financially unopposed.†Even Jack Orchulli, his 2004 opponent, who invested a million of his own dollars, was outspent four to one by Dodd.

So with all that leftover Senate campaign money just sitting there, Dodd didn’t hesitate to transfer it to his presidential campaign. The thinking surely was that even if he didn’t become president, his next Senate campaign would be against another Orchulli and the big bucks would always be out there but the thinking was overtaken by events.

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And now, with his donor base shrinking, Dodd has to face the first tough Senate race of his career with the mortgage scandal, the AIG bonus scandal, the pardon for a felonious friend scandal, the Irish cottage scandal and, as an extra added distraction, the charge he was AWOL as chairman of the Banking Committee while the economy was collapsing. It’s not hard to see why Dodd is redesigning himself as an outraged fixer of the financial mess that evolved while he was running for president.

As part of that effort, he’s currently taking bows for getting a long overdue crackdown on credit card abuses through his banking committee. The bill deals with well-established practices like usurious interest rates, hidden fees and the tendency of credit card companies to foist their cards on anything that moves. But these abuses have been around for a decade or more, affording one more opportunity to ask Dodd where he’s been.

The answer to that question will frequently be, “He was off running for president while the economy was burning.â€

And there remains the growing need for campaign money. In late March, John Paulson, described as one of the world’s richest hedge fund managers, scheduled a fundraiser for Dodd at the same time his committee is involved in hedge fund regulation, raising the usual questions. Then, the fundraiser had to be moved when reporters asked why Dodd was having the party at New York’s Harmonie Club, which has been criticized for having no minority members.

When things go bad...

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