Senate seat could be Republican in 2010

When Sen. Christopher Dodd temporarily released the long-withheld records of his home mortgages — reporters could look at, but not copy them — he said he and his wife will re-refinance the two refinanced mortgages from the failed Countrywide Financial Corporation “to try to insulate ourselves against an accusation that we’re trying to get some special deal.â€

But even if Dodd manages to get his special, “VIP†mortgage deal behind him, he will still have to insulate himself from a much bigger money problem if he runs for a sixth term next year.

He will have to answer charges that the companies responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, which occurred while he headed a Senate committee overseeing them, are the same companies that financed the senator’s political career.

Dodd will be facing angry voters whose lives have been changed for the worse by companies that have contributed millions to his campaigns for the Senate and president, companies that obviously do not generously support the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee out of their high regard for his positions on energy, health care or civil rights.

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Dodd is part of a culture in the Congress that sees nothing wrong with taking money from institutions they’re supposed to oversee, in his case, firms like Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, the late Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and many others. That may still work if you’re watching over the Rules, Small Business or the District of Columbia committees, but the financial institutions Dodd’s Banking Committee supposedly regulate have caused the collapse of the economy and no one has taken more money from them than the senior senator from Connecticut.

The day after Dodd offered reporters a quick peek at the mortgage papers he’d been hiding for months, a research group that keeps track of big money in politics revealed that he’s by far the favorite congressman of the financial entities that received that first $70 billion government bailout, the one that hasn’t worked very well.

The Center for Responsive Politics reported that the firms getting the bailout invested $114 million in lobbying and contributing to members of Congress during the 2008 election cycle. The recipients of contributions from the 161 companies that have received Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money “are the same members of Congress who chair committees charged with regulating the financial sector and overseeing the effectiveness of this unprecedented government program,†said the center’s report.

And, of course, the number one beneficiary of contributions from these companies was Dodd. The senator received a very nice $854,200 from the TARP gang in the 2008 election cycle, when he ever-so-briefly ran for president. Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wasn’t even a close second with $279,000 from the soon-to-be-failed businesses.

The new secretary of the treasury, Tim Geithner, said these companies won’t be allowed to lobby the federal government while they have TARP money, but whether or not they will be able to continue to enrich Senator Dodd with campaign contributions isn’t clear.

After all — wink, wink — it isn’t the companies giving all those dollars to Dodd and his colleagues, it’s the firms’ employees getting together in the company cafeteria to raise a bundle for their political heroes. You may have forgotten it is technically illegal for labor unions and companies to finance political campaigns. That’s why they have their members’ and employees’ Political Action Committees pick their favorite candidates, who, coincidentally, are always the company’s or the union’s favorites, too.

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Dodd has never been apologetic about taking money from the companies in his care. In a 2004 interview, he denied ever being asked to vote one way or another by a donor, saying only “there are issues I agree with them on and work with them on.†He’s always insisted it’s the system of financing campaigns that he and his colleagues are stuck with, a system he cannot unilaterally renounce.

But in 2010, a worthy opponent will demand to know why it took so long for Chairman Dodd to recognize that lending institutions were approving mortgages doomed to be foreclosed or why he insisted that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were “fundamentally sound†when they were on the verge of collapse. Freddie and Fannie gave more campaign money to Dodd than to any other member of Congress.

Depending on the state of the economy, Dodd will, at best, be vulnerable for the first time in his Senate career or already toast in 2010. As a result, the Republican Party, with the right kind of candidate, a moderate, centrist type, could find itself in the novel position of actually having a chance to elect a Connecticut senator for the first time in 28 years.

By the way, that last Republican elected senator in 1982 was Lowell Weicker, a RINO, Republican in Name Only, if there ever was one. The last real FBR, or full blooded Republican, elected senator from Connecticut was George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, who defeated then Congressman Abe Ribicoff in 1956.

That’s 53 years and counting without electing a real Republican senator from Connecticut.

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

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