GRINNELL, Iowa — Chris Dodd understood the thirty people
gathered before him in the Forum South Lounge of Grinnell College
better than they understood themselves — and he wasn’t shy about
saying so.
“For those of you who don’t know me maybe only seen my picture
on television or heard my voice, you’ve been asking two questions
since the moment I walked into this room,” Dodd said. “And they’re
very difficult questions to ask, so I’ll ask them for you.”
No one can say the senior senator isn’t bold or innovative.
Usually politicians take questions from the audience and then
shoehorn a preferred soundbite into the answer. Here was a man
unafraid to streamline the process, to ask and answer his own
questions.
“The first question is ‘Who am I?’” Dodd began. The room was
silent save for some uncomfortable shuffling, a typical reaction to
the threat of late afternoon existentialism. Dodd quickly corrected
his question to more accurately mimic an audience member: “‘Who is
this guy standing in front of me?’” Better. “I don’t mean in the
sense of I haven’t read enough about you” — wait, have we
not read enough about him or has he not read
enough about us? — “or because the national media may not
have paid enough attention.”
Dodd said this last in a way that left little doubt as to
whether, by his lights, the media has paid enough attention. “I
think we’re far more than our resumes. We could all give our CVs
and mark dates in our lives…but I think you should be asking a
far deeper question than what my resume is.”
Things were unraveling here quickly. Dodd was criticizing as too
shallow a query he had made on our behalf and without our input.
How long would it be before he began bickering with himself in two
voices and slapping himself in the face?
“Who am I?” he continued, shifting back to his own point of
view. “Where do I come from? What are my values and character?
What’s my DNA?” The senator paused, as if waiting for someone to
take a saliva swab and run it over to the lab for analysis, then
offered his particulars: His father prosecuted the KKK and the
Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. His sisters taught. He himself
served in the Peace Corps, the Army National Guard and both houses
of Congress. Public service, he said, ran through his veins.
Now that we had settled who he was, Dodd divined from
the ethers the second question too difficult for his audience to
pose itself: “Do I have any idea who you are?” Well, judging by the
first question, probably not. Sometimes, though, when an earnest
child does a magic routine, you just humor the kid and tell him he
picked the card you were thinking of.
“That might be the most important question the electorate ever
asks,” Dodd mused, unabated. “I’m always stunned at the number of
people who run for public office and think the elections are about
them and not about the people they seek to represent.”
Yes, how do people get that impression. Could it be
that certain — cough, cough — politicians spend a great
deal of time answering questions they ask themselves on behalf of
the audience?
“We’d like to know where you stand on various issues,” he
continued, adopting the persona of the audience again momentarily.
“But there are more profound and deeper questions than that. Do you
know who I am? Do I know who you are?”
The lines of perspective blurred as Dodd moved, rhetorically, in
and out of our heads. He assured us, nevertheless, that the answer
was an affirmative on both counts. We knew him. He knew us. And now
that that was settled, Dodd opened the floor up to questions not
channeled through him.
“Will I ever be able to afford a hybrid,” the first inquisitor
asked. “I’d like to support the environment.”
Ugh. On second thought can we just scratch this and let Dodd ask
another question for us?
IT’S NO MYSTERY WHY Chris Dodd is seeking to assert more control
over this process. Thus far, the nomination fight has not had much
of an upside for him, aside from some Daily Kos kudos and a
firefighter union endorsement.
Canvassing the small crowd at Grinnell College, I could not find
a full-fledged supporter of the five-term senator at his own
event, only a few undecided voters, a handful each for Hillary
and Obama, and one overly enthusiastic Biden supporter.
“Joe Biden says Chris Dodd is his best friend,” he said. “You
know that, right?”
Well, at least for the time being those bosom buddies don’t have
to worry about the presidency coming between them. Neither Dodd’s
new television ad (“As you might have guessed, I’m not a former
First Lady or a celebrity…” it begins), nor his repeated
not-so-subtle attempts to goad his audience into subverting
conventional wisdom are designed to steal votes from his pal Joey.
There is bigger game to hunt here and he’s counting on Iowans to
help him get a tough shot off.
“It isn’t just a matter of celebrity or other issues that make
the difference in people’s decision making process here,” he said,
without bothering to define what those other issues were.
We can probably guess what he’s getting at, though. If the
Democratic caucus base is obsessed with identity politics to his
detriment, however, who is Dodd to complain?
His own campaign commitment cards ask people to check off little
boxes signifying their concern for, variously, “Students,”
“Seniors,” “GLBT,” “Hispanic/Latino,” “Asian Americans,” “Women,”
and “African Americans.” (Perhaps tellingly, there is no box for
“Patrician White Men Who Want to be President.”) Dodd encourages
people to think of themselves as interest groups and then becomes
indignant when they take it a step further and incorporate those
biases into their ballot-box mindset.
Details, experience and accomplishments, Dodd high-mindedly
lectured, these are what should really count. “Too often I think we
flirt with the idea that people without any experience or limited
experience can do this job,” Dodd lamented. “I would protest very
strongly.”
And yet the vast majority of the laundry list of accomplishments
he presents is stale, full of victories from the eighties and early
nineties, well before Hillary or Obama came to the Senate. Dodd
proudly notes, for example, a “rather groundbreaking” hearing he
held on sexual abuse…in 1981. He bragged longer about
authoring the Family and Medical Leave Act than about anything else
in his speech. It became law almost fifteen years ago.
While reliving that particular victory, Dodd told a story about
the sweet deal he got from the U.S. government after he had knee
surgery, as a way of illustrating what a wondrous thing medical
leave was.
“I was out for three or fours weeks, I got a paycheck, I didn’t
make a committee hearing, I didn’t make a vote in the U.S. Senate,”
he recounted. “No one raised an eyebrow.”
So, in other words, no one noticed he wasn’t there. Not exactly
a ringing endorsement.
THERE WAS ONE FERVENT fan in the Grinnell audience. Unfortunately
for the senator, it was his wife. Jackie Dodd was a firecracker,
frequently applauding until the audience followed suit, whooping
and hollering at lines in the speech as though they were incredible
truths being revealed to her for the first time and answering
questions posed to her husband. (By the by, don’t tell Mike
Huckabee, but Jackie is a Mormon.) During the non-Chris Dodd
dominated segment of the Q&A a young man asked whether
Republicans such as himself could really trust Dodd to be
bipartisan, Jackie cut in.
“Can I answer that?” she asked. Not waiting for permission, she
turned to the young man. “My entire Republican family, of which
there are probably a couple hundred, are all switching parties to
try to vote for him in the primary.”
As the in-laws go, so too should the nation go? It’s a tough
sell, although Dodd hardly offers a better rationale for his
candidacy during a stump speech that is repetitive, lethargic and
full of the generalizations he endlessly accuses his opponents of
engaging in.
Dodd says he decided to run because he had a daughter born two
days after 9/11, but doesn’t explain it much further than that.
(Hey, Chris, a lot of people have had daughters since
9/11.) He champions his core principles as unshakable, yet when
explaining how he would balance those principles with pragmatism
and his dedication, in theory at least, to bipartisanship, Dodd’s
thinking is muddled at best.
“Fighting is a wonderful thing provided at the end of that fight
you do something on behalf of the people you’re fighting for,” he
explained. “If it’s just a fight for the sake of having a fight or
to make yourself feel good or your core constituency admire you for
the fight, then at the end of the day people will have a very empty
sense about what happened.”
What did happen? Or, more to the point: Do you know who
I am? Do I know who you are?
American Spectator Contributing Editor Shawn Macomber is
writing a book on the Global Class War.
