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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Bob Bennett, Utah's junior senator, is a Republican who was first elected in 1992. He grew up in Salt Lake City, the grandchild of a president of the LDS Church (as is his wife). He was 17 when his father Wallace Bennett was elected in 1950 to the first of four terms in the Senate. He graduated from the University of Utah and 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 believed that Bennett was Bob Woodward's "Deep Throat". 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 the primary 51%-49%. The Democratic nominee, Congressman Wayne Owens, was a familiar face, with a voting record that was moderate--but 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 shown an interest in high-tech issues. He has worked on bills to protect the confidentiality of medical records, with uniform rules for access by researchers and law enforcement personnel. He has embraced some new technology himself: He drives a gasoline-electric hybrid 2000 Honda Insight that gets 61 miles per gallon. He has favored 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. Despite generally supporting the Bush administration, in 2001 he voted against the education bill, which has proved to be unpopular in Utah. He has been one of the few Republican senators voting against his Utah colleague Orrin Hatch's flag amendment. As chairman of the Joint Economic Committee in 2003 he called for rewriting the nation's tax laws, starting from scratch. In 2005, on Social Security, he called for progressively cutting future benefits and establishing personal retirement accounts. "You cannot solve the financial problems with personal accounts. But you cannot solve the long-term demographic problem without personal accounts." 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. 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. In 1999 he urged federal regulators to allow Envirocare to get nuclear waste to store in its hazardous material dump in Tooele County. But in November 2003, after House appropriators included a provision reclassifying waste from the Fernald, Ohio, and Niagara Falls nuclear sites so that it could be sent to Envirocare, he joined Governor Olene Walker in opposing such a transfer, and the provision was dropped in conference. In June 2004 he got the Senate to approve an amendment blocking the moving of military excess mercury to the Utah Industrial Depot, formerly the Tooele Army Depot. In August 2004 he introduced a bill requiring input from Utah residents, radiation monitoring in Utah counties and advance notice before any testing of nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site; Bennett emphasized that he has opposed new nuclear testing while backing development of new nuclear weapons. In April 2005 Bennett said that he might reconsider his support of Yucca Mountain if nuclear waste is deposited at Skull Valley. On the Appropriations Committee Bennett got $18 million for the Natural History Museum at the University of Utah (75% of the collection is federally owned), $30 million for the TRAX light rail medical center extension, $100,000 for streetscaping in the 9th and 9th neighborhood, $100,000 for the Shakespearean theater in Cedar City and $6 million for air quality and botanical research at the University of Utah. For years environmental groups have sought in vain a 9 million acre wilderness area in Utah; in 2004 Bennett said he favored gradual conversion of public lands to wilderness status. In 1992 Bennett said he would run for only two terms, but in 1998 he said he would not rule out running again. He was re-elected 64%-33% that year against a Democrat who was a surgeon with an interest in the microloan programs in Bangladesh. In 2004 his Democratic opponent was former Attorney General Paul Van Dam, who rode around the state with his wife on a tandem bicycle. Bennett's campaign put up a series of billboards without the candidate's name: "Able. Articulate. Aerodynamic." "Big Heart. Big Ideas. Big Ears." "Better Looking than Abraham Lincoln. (Just Barely.)" He outspent Van Dam $2.4 million to $120,000 and won 69%-28%. He might be good for many more terms: his father lived to be 95.
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