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Utah: Junior Senator Sen. Robert Bennett (R) Last Updated July 14, 2003
Bob Bennett, Utah's junior senator, is a Republican who was first elected in 1992. He grew up in Salt Lake City, and was 17 when his father Wallace Bennett was elected in 1950 to the first of four terms in the Senate. Bob Bennett worked as a congressional staffer and was the Transportation Department's chief lobbyist during the Nixon administration. He also headed the public relations firm (and CIA front) that employed Watergate burglar Howard Hunt, but was involved in no wrongdoing himself; some Watergate buffs believe that Bennett was Bob Woodward's ''Deep Throat,'' but both Bennett and Woodward have denied it. After that, Bennett headed Microsonics Corporation, which makes audio discs for talking toys, for three years, then became head of Franklin Quest, which produces the Franklin day planners and organizers; he increased it from four to 700 employees and brought in sales of $80 million; he sold his interest in 1991 for a reported $25 million. He headed a commission that produced Utah's Strategic Plan for Education and wrote Gaining Control, a book on how to control your daily life. In 1992, when Jake Garn retired from the Senate, Bennett decided to run for the seat his father once held. He was not the only millionaire in the race. The initial favorite was Republican Joseph Cannon, who had taken over the old Geneva Steel plant and made it profitable, and who spent $5 million of his own money. But Bennett spent $1.4 million of his own and effectively attacked Geneva's environmental record and won 51%-49%. The Democratic nominee, Congressman Wayne Owens, was a familiar face, with a voting record that was moderate--perhaps too liberal for Utah. Bennett won 55%-40%. Bennett has had a moderate to conservative voting record and became Chief Deputy Whip in January 2003. He has worked for several years on bills to protect the confidentiality of medical records, with uniform rules for access by researchers and law enforcement personnel. He sponsored a bill to limit liability on debit cards as it is on credit cards, and one to establish a uniform minimalist framework for digital signatures and electronic verification over the Internet. In 1997, before most other senators were thinking about the problem, Bennett sponsored a bill to require businesses to disclose what they were doing to fix Y2K errors. In April 1998 Trent Lott made him chairman of a Select Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. His first priorities were public utilities, telecommunications and transportation; later he spotlighted the unpreparedness of health care providers, and got the SEC to require disclosure of business spending on the problem. In July 2000 he moved successfully to reduce the time to review computer export controls from 180 days to 60 days; in March 2001 he moved to change the MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second) standards for exports, with new ones to be set by the Bush administration. In 2001 and 2002 he worked for a law that would exempt from the Freedom of Information Act information on computer intrusions that businesses share with the federal government; he argued that this was necessary to protect the Internet from hackers and cyberterrorists. He has embraced some new technology himself: He drives a gasoline-electric hybrid 2000 Honda Insight that gets 61 miles per gallon. He has come out in favor of sales taxes on Internet transactions; in his mail order business, he says, he charged customers sales tax in every state and no one protested. In the debate on homeland security, Bennett strongly supported the personnel provisions backed by the Bush administration. He cited his experiences at the then new Department of Transportation, where only the secretary's power to transfer personnel as needed enabled him to meld the congressional liaison offices of the FAA, Urban Mass Transit Authority, Coast Guard and Federal Highway Administration into a single responsive unit. In the debate over corporate accounting in July 2002, Bennett warned against making too many changes that might have unanticipated effects; he cited a 1993 law which barred companies from expensing executive salaries over $1 million, which he said led to more companies granting stock options. In the March 2001 debate he offered an amendment to bar PACs from using soft money for fundraising and operating expenses; opposed by unions, it was defeated by advocates of the McCain-Feingold bill. Bennett has pressed for land exchanges between Utah and the federal government, to eliminate the checkerboard pattern of land ownership which prevents Utah from producing revenue for education from mining on state lands; he notes that the idea was pushed by his father 40 years ago and by Democratic Governor Scott Matheson 20 years ago. In September 2000 he came out against the proposed nuclear waste depository on the lands of the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Indians; in July 2002 he and Orrin Hatch supported the nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada: better to have the waste transported over Utah than stored in Utah. On the Appropriations Committee, he got $34.5 million extra for security at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City after September 11. In September 2002 Bennett led the effort by Western state Republicans to get the same flexibility in forest management for their states that Tom Daschle, using his power as majority leader, got for South Dakota. On Appropriations he secured $15 million for the Natural History Museum at the University of Utah (75% of the collection is federally owned), $3.5 million to preserve 15,000 acres in Summit County, more payments in lieu of taxes on federal lands, $2 million for the Castle Rock Ranch, $300,000 for the Wasatch Canyons water quality initiative, $16 million for a computer support facility at Hill Air Force Base, $650,000 for Mormon cricket control (there has been a population explosion of these crop-eating insects) and $1.2 million for the Sevier County Multi-Events Center. Bennett was re-elected 64%-33% in 1998 against a Democrat who was a surgeon with an interest in the microloan programs in Bangladesh. In 1992 he said he would run for only two terms, but in 1998 Bennett said he would not rule out running again in 2004, and just before September 11 he said, "I'm leaning strongly toward running again." In mid-2003 no candidate had appeared; state Democratic Chairman Meg Holbrook said, "Don't be surprised if it's not a regular politician." Bennett might be good for many more terms. Longevity runs in the family: his father lived to be 95, and his grandfather Heber Grant was president of the LDS Church, a job that goes to the longest serving member of the Quorum of the Twelve Disciples.
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