Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Carrie Johnson have a profile up at the Washington Post on Senator Dodd. The headline is The Banker’s Candidate; Dodd Amasses Huge War Chest. Before I discuss this profile I want everyone that participated in Senator Dodd’s Q & A to know that his office contacted me to let me know that it’s been a circus down there and that their responses have been delayed. They’ll get to it.
It’s a sad fact that you can’t win the nomination of one of the two major parties without raising obscene quantities of cash. The problem is so great that the media is not wholly unjustified in looking at campaign coffers to decide who is viable or electable. Nothing about George W. Bush made him more qualified to be President than Orrin Hatch or John McCain. He was barely qualified to stand on the same stage with Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes. But he had gadzillions of dollar bills. And that meant he was viable. We can talk about what to do about this situation in another thread, but it is a reality that we cannot deny.
So far the media has annointed Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the front-runners, and they can’t deny polling that shows John Edwards is a serious contender. Beyond that, they are doing their best to ignore that there are other candidates. Part of that is based on early meaningless polling and part of that is based on campaign coffers. As Birnbaum and Johnson note, Senator Dodd is polling very low at the moment. But, as they also note:
Among Democrats, Dodd’s $5 million campaign nest egg is surpassed only by that of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), who has one of the most elaborate fundraising machines ever assembled…
Dodd collected $3 million in the last three months of 2006, outraising even Clinton. Employees of American International Group and Morgan Stanley were among the largest givers.
There is a very simple reason that Sen. Dodd has been able to raise so much cash. He is the Chairman of the Senate Banking committee.
Financial services companies “will be making contributions to Dodd’s presidential run because they can’t afford to annoy him,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Whether or not his presidential ambitions go anywhere, he’ll still be the chairman of Senate Banking Committee, and they will still need his goodwill.”
Senator Dodd wants to be President of the United States. He’s running against a very formidable candidate in Hillary Clinton. He has to contend with the personal magnetism and compelling life-story of Barack Obama. Senator Biden has a high profile perch as Chairman of Foreign Relations. He’s using it to try to repeal the Iraq War resolution. John Edwards is well known from his Vice-Presidential run and he has an army of trial lawyers supporting him. Bill Richardson has the best resume in politics. Wesley Clark has a large loyal following. Dodd has the financial services industry.
This is the state of American politics. It’s distasteful. You’d like to think that anyone could become president and that they wouldn’t need to take donations from big business to get elected. Someone might figure out a way to do that someday…I hope they do…but the important things are still a candidate’s actual policy positions and leadership skills.
I come at financial services from the bottom as a small investor and an activist that used to work with ACORN. From that side of things, Dodd has a decent record.
He has also taken positions on a few narrow issues that anger financial firms but are popular with the populists who usually vote Democratic.
For instance, Dodd said he intends to campaign against predatory-lending practices by banks, which entail charging excessive interest rates on mortgage loans, often to low-income people. He also said he wants to crack down on excessive fees charged by credit card companies.
Dodd has leveraged his committee’s jurisdiction to press for Wall Street jobs for low-income workers. In recent weeks, he has reached out to minority voters with a speech at the Rainbow/Push Coalition’s Wall Street Economic Summit in New York. At the summit, convened by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Dodd decried economic inequality and pledged to establish a “working group” to expand opportunities for minorities in the financial services industry.
Since assuming the Banking Committee chairmanship last month, Dodd has held hearings on predatory mortgage loans and high-interest-rate credit cards that burden consumers with unwieldy debt.
Predatory loans, check cashing joints, and income tax preparers are the banes of the ghetto. They’re actually worse than crack dealers because they have managed to make what they do legal. And they did it by making large cash contributions to politicians (mostly Republicans). I’m glad to see that Senator Dodd is no ally of these people. Dodd also worked on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was Congress’s answer to the Enron/MCI scandals.
On the down side:
He has opposed vigorous federal regulation of hedge funds, many of which are based in Connecticut. He also was the Senate’s leading champion of a 1995 law that limited shareholders’ right to bring class-action lawsuits against companies for alleged securities misdeeds.
I’m not very impressed with either one of those positions. There is some element of representing a home state business interest (somewhat like Joe Biden’s loathesome vote on the Bankruptcy Bill). I’d like to see a liberal Democrat put the people of East Hartford over the Hedge Fund operators. Here’s what Dodd has to say about his cozy relationship with the financial services industry:
He said he will not hesitate to shake Wall Street’s money tree, even though he is chairman of the committee that watches over its companies. But accepting millions of dollars from industries that his committee oversees will not affect his policy decisions, Dodd said.
“My record speaks for itself,” the senator said. “I haven’t changed my tune. I’ve been, I think, fairly consistent in my views on these issues.”
Again, I don’t see how Dodd could run for President without shaking the Wall Street money tree. He’s just in a better position to do it than some of the other candidates. The question is whether he would be a fair president that would remember to protect all those little people getting squashed by predatory loans, defrauded out of their modest investments, and denied bankruptcy protection.
One thing is clear though. He has enough money in the bank to pass half the viability test. Now he just needs to see a bump in the polls.
