Chris Dodd is up for reelection next year and polls showing him vulnerable have swelled the ranks of Republicans prepared to challenge him. This week Linda McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and wife of WWE Chairman and wrestling impresario Vince McMahon, threw her hat in the ring. A brief review of her background strongly suggests that she is jumping in too early and would be best served by waiting two years to establish her political bona fides and then challenge a very vulnerable Joe Lieberman.

I looked through McMahon’s website today and was extremely disappointed with what I found. Here are a few of the lowlights:

“Senator Chris Dodd has lost his way. It’s a sad day for Connecticut when we can’t trust our Senator because he puts his own personal interests before those of working families.”

“She is running for the United States Senate because she believes Chris Dodd has allowed special interests and his own interests to affect how he represents Connecticut.”

“I talk all the time about how important it is for people to vote. And it is. Yet, I haven’t always been the best example myself. I missed a general election vote in ‘06. I missed several local elections. I didn’t vote in the ’08 presidential primary after John McCain was the presumptive nominee. I regret it, I apologize, and I don’t make any excuses for it. I think it’s important that leaders be willing to step up and own their mistakes when they make them. That’s how I plan to run my campaign, and it’s how I intend to represent Connecticut in the U.S. Senate.”

“Linda is a fiscal conservative who is concerned about the massive deficit spending in Washington and the huge debt with which we are saddling the country and future generations. She knows how to manage a budget, create jobs, and stimulate our economy.”

In addition, the sum total of McMahon’s political experience is her appointment, in the spring of 2009, to the Connecticut Board of Education.

OK, let’s consider these statements starting with Chris Dodd. Dodd was weakened by two events in the past year both of which have proved false or inaccurate. The first was an extensive investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee of a mortgage Dodd took out with Countrywide Financial. Dodd was accused of having received, and failed to disclose, preferential treatment via extremely favorable terms on his loan – essentially a gift that went unreported. The Ethics Committee, a bipartisan group of 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans, spent a year combing through a mountain of evidence (18,000 pages of documents) and hearing from numerous witnesses, before concluding that the terms Dodd received were widely available to thousands of other Countrywide customers and were not even among the best terms Countrywide offered. He received a minor slap on the wrist for not taking steps to “avoid the appearance that you were receiving preferential treatment based on your status as a Senator” but was otherwise completely and fully exonerated of all charges.

The second cloud hanging over Dodd was the accusation that he inserted language into the stimulus bill exempting executive compensation agreements entered into prior to February 2009 from the compensation limits imposed on firms receiving bailout funds. Dodd received considerable campaign contributions from executives of AIG and the spring payments of $165 million to many of those executives resulted in enormous public backlash. Republicans immediately targeted Dodd as the author of the amendment allowing the payments and the White House essentially left Dodd out in the cold. But the facts have proven Dodd completely innocent and Tim Geithner has fallen on the sword for imposing the language on Dodd. In fact, Dodd had inserted language that limited bonus payments to only one third of salary but he was overridden by Geithner and Summers and the new language exempting the large payments was inserted.

There may be other charges against Dodd that I’m not aware of but they don’t appear boldly in any news coverage I’ve read. So how can McMahon accuse Dodd of putting his own personal interests and special interests ahead of CT voters? The evidence doesn’t support that claim.

McMahon trumpets her experience in running and building a publicly traded company as credentials to show that she knows how to manage a budget, create jobs, and stimulate our economy. Frankly, I’d be more impressed by those credentials if she was running for mayor but I fail to see the direct connection to being a US Senator. I certainly see a very direct connection, however, between her failure to vote and her genuine interest in Connecticut politics. McMahon didn’t build a business to stimulate the economy; she built a business to make as much money as possible, and good for her. But let’s not pretend otherwise and let’s not pretend that failing to vote in the last elections (which included a 2006 vote for the Senate seat won by Joe Lieberman!) can be swept aside with a simple “I apologize.”

Currently I am undecided in next year’s election. I defend Chris Dodd not because I support him but because I don’t like to see a person unfairly attacked. Linda McMahon is almost certainly a highly intelligent woman and, given the world she has successfully negotiated, likely a tough and talented politician in-the-making. She has promised to finance her campaign out of her own pocket, she will accept no money from any special interests, and individual contributions will be limited to $100 – nobody will own Linda McMahon and she will owe no political favors in return. Her personal fortune gives her real political advantages. But her political background is even thinner than Sarah Palin’s and at this point we know nothing about her knowledge of domestic and global political issues. I’d like to see her spend the next two years making a name for herself, brushing up on national political issues, getting around Connecticut and understanding the various constituencies that make up the Nutmeg State, and getting ready to take on a very vulnerable Joe Lieberman in 2012. Oh, and don’t forget to vote.

Tags: 2010 Senate, Chris Dodd, Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, Linda McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 8:17 am and is filed under News/Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.