A New Generation of Leadership: Dodd, Dorgan to Retire
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Related subjects: J.E. Robertson, U.S. Elections, U.S. news, U.S. Politics, Vote 2010 Comments Off
Democratic senators Chris Dodd (CT) and Byron Dorgan (ND) have announced they will not run for re-election after their current term is up, later this year. The Democratic governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, Jr., has also announced he will not seek a second term, opening up the Democratic field in the race for the party’s 2010 nomination. The lieutenant governor of Michigan, John Cherry, has also withdrawn from the race to replace Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm.
The withdrawals and retirements have been framed by Republicans as high-level “resignations”, allegedly evincing widespread disenchantment with the Democratic party and the agenda of Pres. Barack Obama. In fact, in each case, the reasons appear personal and linked to the local specifics of the political campaign process. In Connecticut, Dodd himself is the issue, as some recent policy choices and personal moves have led to a drop in support for the longest-serving senator in Connecticut history. In Michigan, Granholm has been saddled with the blame for Michigan’s twenty-year-long economic slump.
In Colorado, party politics appears to be more to blame: Ritter fell out with legislators in his own party and is facing a distinctly united and energized Republican opposition; Democrats will now be seeking someone with Ritter’s broad appeal and fresh approach to counter the Republican offensive. On the whole, the Democratic party now sees itself facing the kind of choice it faced in 2008, between seniority and name-recognition and embarking on the full transition to a new generation of leadership.
The Republican party has spent several years immersed in mounting ideological and tactical disarray. Earlier this year, six Republican incumbents announced they would not seek re-election to the US Senate in 2010. The retirements had largely been forgotten, but with six Republicans retiring and only two Democrats, many analysts believe the electoral math may still favor the Democrats.
As FOX News has reported, “Democrats are vacating four seats in the Senate in November — in Illinois, Connecticut, Delaware and North Dakota. Republican incumbents are abandoning seats in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio.” There is speculation Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison could be the seventh retirement from the Senate for her party, if she chooses to run for governor, or runs and wins.
There are further complications for Democrats, with New York’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand —Hillary Rodham Clinton’s replacement— facing a regular election in November, and the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly held by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, now held by his Democratic replacement, up for special election on 19 January, two weeks from yesterday. In that race, Massachusetts’ attorney general Martha Coakley (D) will be running against state Sen. Scott Brown (R).
In all, eighteen Democratic Senate seats are considered to be “in play” for the November election, while nearly as many Republican seats might be competitive as well. The Republicans, however, are facing a worsening internal divide between mainstream Republicans and conservative “Tea Party” activists. According to the Dallas Morning News, “more than half of [Texas'] Republicans in the U.S. House face challengers from the right — most from the anti-tax Tea Party movement.”
The Tea Party challenge to mainstream Republican candidates, some of them even well-established conservatives, could split the party and lead to a number of repeats of what took place in 2009 in New York’s 23rd Congressional district:
For the first time in the district’s history, going back to the 19th century, a Democrat has won New York’s 23rd Congressional district, thanks in part to Sarah Palin and other Republican radicals. A move by Palin, Rick Santorum, Fred Thompson and other extremist conservatives to impose their will on the local Republican party, forcing their own party’s candidate out of the race, has resulted in a win for the Democrats.
The Democratic win shows the deep rift running through the Republican party’s organizational structure and its base, and the very real pitfalls of its openly professed campaign for ideological “purity”. The party is still grappling with fallout from the failed politics of the Bush years, and the Abramoff and DeLay corruption scandals, so much so that RNC Chairman Michael Steele said this week he did not believe his party would retake control of the House of Representatives, but that if it were possible, the party needed to be asking if its people are “ready” to lead. He suggested they might not be and might get “drunk on power” and commit some of the same mistakes of the past decade.
11 of 20 Republican House members from Texas are now facing challenges, and some of those races could result in a third-party challenge, either from the Conservative party —as in New York, in 2009— or a new conservative-leaning party. The long-term effect on the integrity of the Republican brand could be dire. Or, it could create a newly “ideologically pure” Republican party that is not expansive enough to win national elections or govern effectively.
The elections of 2010 may, in this way, be startlingly more important that most mid-term elections, not in that they may transfer control of the House of Representatives to the opposition, but in that they may fundamentally re-shape the dynamics of the “two-party system” that traditionally dominates American electoral politics. The RNC is likely to have learned from the New York 23rd race and will pick its candidate prior to a party split, but the damage to party unity may not be controllable.
The Democrats are also looking at some serious primary races: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) —an appointee named to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she left the Senate to become Sec. of State.— is the likely Democratic candidate, but there’s talk of former House member Harold Ford, Jr., running to replace her as the party’s candidate. Ford is popular among Democrats generally, and is now a resident of New York, though he had represented Tennessee in the House and lost a bid there for the Senate.
While Dorgan’s retirement is a significant problem for Democrats —as Republicans tend to fare better in North Dakota, and his withdrawal increases the probability that any Democrat elected there will be problematically conservative, and a less dependable supporter of the party’s legislative agenda—, it is believed Dodd’s retirement could be a sign of promise for the Democrats. Richard Blumenthal, the state’s current attorney general is very popular and is expected to have a strong chance of winning Dodd’s seat against any Republican challenger.
Gillibrand, Ford, Blumenthal, or whoever takes the reins of Democratic politics in these and other states, the clear meaning of these retirements is the passing of the torch to a new generation of leadership. Ted Kennedy himself, whose seat will be part of this generational transition, in backing Barack Obama at the DNC in 2008, called on voters to “reject the counsels of doubt and calculation” and recognize the virtues of “a new generation of leadership”.
Dodd, a long-time close friend of Sen. Kennedy, said today in impassioned tones that there comes a time for every elected official “to step aside and let someone else step up”. Dodd is clearly aware that the political winds have shifted against him, but said it would be “absurd” to use polling numbers to determine what would take place in an election 11 months out. His withdrawal from the race appears to be a commitment to the interest of passing the torch to a new generation of Democratic leadership, and the party will now be more focused on doing just that than it otherwise might have been.
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