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Connecticut: Senior Senator Sen. Christopher Dodd (D) Last Updated July 25, 2003
Christopher Dodd was almost born into politics, one of six senators who are children of former senators (Lisa Murkowski, Mark Pryor, Evan Bayh, Lincoln Chafee and Bob Bennett are the others). His father Thomas Dodd, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, was elected to the House in 1952, when Chris was eight; he lost a Senate race to Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, in 1956, then won in 1958. Chris Dodd served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic from 1966-68. In 1967 the older Dodd was censured by the Senate for misuse of funds; he ran as an independent in 1970 and Chris Dodd managed his campaign, in which he finished behind Republican Lowell Weicker and Democrat Joseph Duffey, for whom Yale Law School student Bill Clinton was working as a volunteer. Almost immediately after law school, Christopher Dodd ran for the House in the open-seat eastern Connecticut 2d District and, in the Watergate year of 1974, won comfortably. He was re-elected easily and in 1980 outmaneuvered fellow Watergate Democrat Toby Moffett to get the Democratic nomination to succeed Senator Abraham Ribicoff; he won that race by a wide margin. Dodd, who speaks fluent Spanish, has often played a role on Latin American issues. On the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee in the 1980s he took the lead in opposing U.S. military aid to El Salvador's government and aid to the Nicaraguan contras. He has long backed freer travel to Fidel Castro's Cuba and an end to the embargo on trade with Cuba. But he opposed the language in the House Republicans' June 2000 bill on lifting the embargo on food and medicine, which he said would restrict the president's ability to open up travel to Cuba. Dodd threatened a filibuster on the issue, and prevented it from being passed in June 2000 with the aid package that included the Clinton administration's $1 billion-plus Plan Colombia. In October, with some grumbling, he voted for the bill lifting the embargo, which passed by a wide margin. In contrast to his wariness of U.S. military aid in Central America in the 1980s, he supported Plan Colombia, to provide equipment and military training to Colombians fighting the FARC guerrillas. In 2001 and 2002 he blocked the confirmation of the Cuban-born Otto Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs and even refused to hold a hearing on the nomination. Dodd and his staff had tangled with Reich in the 1980s when he was head of the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy and supported aid to the contras while Dodd insisted the Sandinistas had no Communist connections and that they were the choice of the Nicaraguan people; when elections were held the Sandinistas lost. Reich served through 2002 under a recess appointment and Dodd claimed that he had signaled support for the abortive coup that in May 2002 threatened the rule of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez; Reich was not renominated in January 2003. On other areas of foreign policy, Dodd does not take such a leftish position. In September 2002 he called for international cooperation to disarm Saddam Hussein but said that lacking that, "I don't think we have any choice but to act alone." He voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002. Connecticut, with its big insurance companies, has long been a creditor state, and one that is leery of trial lawyers. In 1995 Dodd was the chief Democratic sponsor of the securities litigation bill sought by high-tech companies and fought by trial lawyers. "People shouldn't make a business out of ambulance chasing when a stock simply fluctuates on the market," he said. When Bill Clinton vetoed it, Dodd immediately started lobbying Senate and House Democrats, and both houses in December 1995 voted to override. In 1996 and 1998 he worked with Phil Gramm and Alfonse D'Amato to successfully pass a law barring class-action securities litigation suits from state courts, requiring them to be heard in federal court where the rules are stricter. He was a lead sponsor of the product liability bill vetoed by Clinton in May 1996. In March 2002 he and Jon Corzine sponsored a bill to prohibit accountants performing audits from providing many consulting and non-audit services and to allow them to provide tax consulting only if approved by the audit committee. Dodd was the lead Democratic sponsor of the terrorism bill, which passed the Senate in June 2002. His original version would have had the government pay for the first $10 billion of terrorism claims each year and then 90% of the rest. The House version, passed in December 2001, required insurers to repay the government and provided full coverage of only the first $1 billion of damage. In lengthy negotiations, Dodd managed to get a bill limiting claims to a sliding scale of percentages of premiums and placing a surcharge on all commercial insurance if companies' claims exceeded a sliding scale of limits. But there was intense argument over the House's provision shielding property owners from pain and suffering damages in lawsuits. Finally Dodd's compromise was accepted by the Republicans, consolidating lawsuits in a single federal court and setting up rigid tests for holding property owners liable. Dodd has a pleasant, friendly manner and seems unfazed by opposition and approaches debates with an affable air, deflating opponents' indignation and suggesting that they are all in this game together. In November 1994 he made an attempt to get a position in the national spotlighted after Jim Sasser, who had expected to run for Senate majority leader, was defeated for reelection by Bill Frist. Dodd spent a month campaigning among colleagues for the minority leadership and lost to Tom Daschle by just 24-23. Dodd was promptly asked by Bill Clinton to be Democratic National Committee chairman. Dodd performed ably in public debates and set-tos with Republican Chairman Haley Barbour, but was embarrassed in October 1996 when he followed White House orders to stonewall on charges that DNC top-level fundraiser John Huang raised millions in illegal foreign contributions. Dodd plausibly denied that he knew much about Huang, who was placed at the committee personally by Clinton; he was less plausible when he said he never thought the White House coffees, some of which he attended, were fundraisers. Dodd dropped the chairmanship in January 1997, and mostly avoided investigations of the DNC thereafter. In 2000 he lobbied hard to get his junior colleague Joe Lieberman nominated for vice president, assuring Jesse Jackson, NEA head Bob Chase, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney that Lieberman was a good Democrat. His ambitions for a leadership post may have subsided for a while, but they have not completely disappeared. In December 2002, when many thought that Daschle would step down from the leadership to run for president, Dodd began calling on senators and seemed likely to run against Daschle's favorite, Whip Harry Reid. But in January 2003 Daschle announced that he was not running for president and would stay as Minority Leader. There was another position, of course, that opens up every four years: The presidency. Dodd mulled a run for president, but in March 2003 announced he would remain in the Senate; he then endorsed Lieberman's candidacy. Presidential elections are not an unfamiliar subject to Dodd. As ranking member on and then as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, he worked with Mitch McConnell on the elections procedure bill that just about everyone thought was necessary after the Florida controversy. Both sides accepted many provisions, but there were significant differences between the House bill passed in December 2001 and the Senate bill passed in April 2002. Most matters were agreed on: Provisional voting, computerized voter lists, improved access to the polls for the disabled, $3.9 billion to help states upgrade their equipment. Approval was delayed over disagreement over whether first-time voters who register by mail should have to show driver's licenses. Finally it was agreed that they could use utility bills, bank statements, paychecks, government documents with their names and addresses instead, and the bill was signed in October 2002. Other Dodd causes include children's medicine. With Ohio Republican Mike DeWine, Dodd has worked to promote testing of psychiatric drugs prescribed for young children, and they have pressed for continuation of the provision extending the patent life of drugs for pharmaceutical companies that conduct studies of their effects on children. In June 2002, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs approved tribal designation for Connecticut's Eastern Pequots, Dodd joined other Connecticut elected officials in opposing a new casino in the state. Dodd and Lieberman tried to get the Senate to agree to a one-year moratorium on recognition of new Indian tribes and lost 80-15. In September Dodd met with tribal leaders and said that BIA's designation process had to be fixed. On another state issue, Dodd has worked to preserve the old Colt complex in Hartford, where the Colt .45 was made, the telegraph first conceptualized and jet engine technology first developed. Dodd was easily re-elected in 1998. His Republican opponent was Gary Franks, elected congressman in 1990 and defeated in 1996 in the often marginal 5th District, and one of the few black Republicans to serve in Congress. Franks' attacks on Dodd's closeness to Bill Clinton and his attendance record struck no sparks, especially since Franks was outspent by $3 million. He won 65%-32%, carrying all but six of the state's cities and towns. In February 2001 Dodd said he would run for re-election in 2004; mentioned as a possible Republican opponent is state Republican Chairman Chris DePino.
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