President Dodd

Ok, this one is for fun.

I suspect many people know he ran in the 2008 primaries, but like everybody got squeezed out in the clash of the titans.

So let's go back.

In 1994 Senator Dodd lost the vote for Senate Minority Leader by a single vote, to Senator Daschle. The Senate caucus went with the moderate low-key Daschle over the more liberal and more fight-y Dodd. (Amusingly it was tied 23-23 and the deciding vote was cast by Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who switched to the Republicans soon after.)

The POD, then, is that Dodd wins the vote. He's up against the height of the Republican Revolution, albeit he's facing off against Majority Leader Dole instead of Gingrich in the House.


Can a determined Democratic Senate caucus stop the Republican agenda dead in its tracks? And does this give Dodd a high enough profile over the comparatively struggling Clinton White House and VP Gore for Dodd to run in and win in the 2000 primaries?
 
I think that would be quite interesting. Dodd, at least in this campaign, was one of the more liberal candidates running. His victory would be a victory over Clinton's 'pragmatic conservative' party, over the DLC, and over the post-Mondale shift to the right.

The real problem is his ties to the banking industry. Scandals have already begun to emerge; if he were President, they could evolve into a real crisis, worthy of censure at the very least. It's not so much corruption as geography. He's senator from Connecticut; of course he's going to be close to the banking industry, just like the senator from Montana will be tied to the gun industry or the senator from Oklahoma will be tied to crazy people.

(No offence to the people of Oklahoma; I don't think you're all crazy. Well, some of you, at least. Not like Arkansas.)
 
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