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MORE BAD LOCAL PRESS: Dodd?s Costly Errors: Two years ago, presidential candidate Chris Dodd ann?

By Glenn Reynolds

MORE BAD LOCAL PRESS: Dodd’s Costly Errors:

Two years ago, presidential candidate Chris Dodd announced that he wouldn’t be running for the Senate in 2010 but he didn’t mean it.

He only said it to get the Federal Election Commission to let him use leftover millions from his 2004 Senate race to run for president. (The FEC requires a presidential candidate to say he’s not going to run for the office for which the funds were contributed but doesn’t hold him to it. It’s a very thoughtful rule.)

As things turned out, using up his Senate campaign money was a mistake, Dodd’s second, if you consider the first was his decision to run for president. There was a lot of money involved, $4.7 million, and it went toward the $16 million Dodd raised to attract 1 percent of the Democratic Iowa Caucus before quitting the race and moving his family out of their Iowa home and back to Connecticut. . . . And now, with his donor base shrinking, Dodd has to face the first tough Senate race of his career with the mortgage scandal, the AIG bonus scandal, the pardon for a felonious friend scandal, the Irish cottage scandal and, as an extra, added distraction, the charge he was AWOL as chairman of the banking committee while the economy was collapsing. It’s not hard to see why Dodd is redesigning himself as an outraged fixer of the financial mess that evolved while he was running for president.

Good luck with that.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on April 15, 2009 (boomark / email).