Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, the man legendary Mormon columnist Jack Anderson referred to as “Howard Hughes’s man in Washington,” is going to be the first incumbent senator to lose his job this year.
A new Salt Lake Tribune poll of Republican delegates shows Bennett running in third, behind GOP challengers Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater.
Lee logged 37 percent support in the survey, while Bridgewater came in at 20 percent, and Bennett lagged at 16 percent.
The survey of 400 Republican delegates, with a 4.4 percent margin of error, was conducted April 22-25 by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. of Washington, D.C. It comes less than two weeks before the May 8 state GOP convention.“Bennett has almost no shot of getting more votes at the convention than Bridgewater and Lee,” Brad Coker, managing director at Mason-Dixon, said Monday.
Utah uses a delegate system to determine who will be on the ballot. If any candidate gets 60% of the delegates, they win the primary outright. If not, then the two top delegate-winners face off before the Republican electorate at-large.
Sen. Bennett has always worried me because of his sinister early career as head of the Robert Mullen Company (a CIA front operation), his relationship with the shadowy Howard Hughes, and his murky connections to Watergate (e.g., he once employed E. Howard Hunt). But he’s actually been on the reasonable side of the Republican caucus over his long career, and that is now costing him his position. Although he is taking heat for voting for Bush’s initial Wall Street bailout plan, he was hardly alone among Republicans on that vote. What’s really crippling him is his decision in 2008 to team up with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in introducing the Healthy Americans Act, which included an individual mandate (notice that the 2008 Heritage Foundation critique did not like the mandate but made no argument that it would be unconstitutional). Now that the Republican Party has decided that an individual mandate is some of kind of insidious totalitarian plot, Sen. Bennett is left holding the bag.
Darren Park, a delegate from Riverton, is one of those. He hasn’t decided between backing [Mike] Lee or [Tim] Bridgewater, but says he won’t vote for Bennett because of the senator’s health care proposal, which would have required individuals to buy health care, and his support for the first round of bank bailouts during the Bush administration.
“It’s very much about Senator Bennett and not only what he has done and what he didn’t do,” Park said, in opposing congressional actions “that are incompatible, I believe, with the values and principles most Utahns share.”
Interestingly, the poll also found that 68% of the GOP’s delegates in Utah consider themselves aligned with the Tea Party.
In a better world, the Democrats would be ready to challenge for this open seat. Unfortunately, I don’t see it happening. If anyone knows what the Democrats in Utah plan on doing, let me know. The likely winner, Mike Lee, is a former clerk for Samuel Alito. If you want to know what he’ll be like in the U.S. Senate, think Jim DeMint. Do we really just have to lie here and take this? I guess we do. In the modern GOP, a former CIA frontman and bagman for Howard Hughes is now too moderate.
