We all know that Connecticut has become an unexpected early battleground in the 2010 cycle, and Republicans are touting Simmons as a strong challenger to the vulnerable Chris Dodd.
The longtime Senator has had a lot of problems over the past few months, from his seat on Banking to the mortgage controversy. But it now looks like he is at risk of being hit further by AIG. And this is happening very unfairly: people who are actually to blame – especially Timothy Geithner – is unfairly throwing the blame on Dodd!
The controversy stems from a new NYT article:
The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.
Campaign Diaries explains why this is outrageous:
In February, Chris Dodd had introduced an amendment to the stimulus bill that would have imposed retroactive bonus caps on companies receiving bailout money – meaning that bonuses agreed to before February 11th would also fall under the legislation’s scope. As numerous news stories attest to, Geithner and Larry Summers both called Dodd, urging him to drop retroactivity. Dodd nonetheless pushed through the amendment (SA 354 to H.R.1) but it was then thrown out during the conference committee. (Jane Hamsher provides a clear and detailed documentation of this sequence of events.) …
[Now, in that NYT story,] a Treasury official is telling the media that there is no way to stop the AIG bonuses because the stimulus bill does not make restrictions radioactive. The official claims that Dodd is responsible for the provision’s ineffectiveness, but, as I explained above, it is Dodd who was trying to introduce radioactivity in the bill and the Treasury (via Geithner) who beat back his efforts to do so! In short: Geithner is deflecting his responsibility on one of the most endangered Democratic Senators of the 2010 cycle.
I know there is a lot of disagreement as to whether Dodd is actually vulnerable, whether Simmons could possibly beat him, but we can’t deny that the Senator’s numbers are truly dismal and that this is the sort of scandal that can drive him further down a hole – especially in the current context.
We’re seeing people like Paterson or Corzine lose their popularity and become VERY endangered in 2009/2010 because of the fiscal crisis. Senators are generally more protected, but Dodd is definitely on the front lines since he is the Chairman of the Banking Committee. For Treasury to (unfairly) throw the blame on a vulnerable Democratic Senator could definitely be a tremendous help for the GOP and it could lead to a whole cycle of anti-Dodd stories in Connecticut, so Treasury’s actions are really incomprehensible to me.
Do you think Dodd will be able to deflect the blame on this one? Or will it feed the growing anti-Dodd frenzy?