Senator Chris Dodd zipped into Grinnell Thursday after the Democratic presidential debate hosted early Thursday afternoon for a brief talk and questions from the audience. Speaking in the Forum South Lounge, Dodd focused on women's issues as Day One of his "12 Days of Results" tour around Iowa.
Speaking less than two hours after the last presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses ended, Dodd seemed hurried and tired, speaking quickly and sometimes fumbling over his words. But he also seemed to draw energy from the presence in the room of his wife Jackie Marie Clegg and two young daughters Grace, 6, and Christina, 2.
On several occasions during his question and answer session, Clegg interrupted her husband to provide answers both personal and political. For example, when Dan Blees '10 asked his usual question about how Dodd would attract the support of Republicans like Blees, Clegg broke in.
"My entire Republican family, of which there's probably a couple hundred, they're all switching parties to try to vote for [Dodd] in the primaries," she said. "And I mean [they are] big Republicans."
"Yes, but they have to," Sen. Dodd quipped, before launching into his reply to Blees's question.
Dodd's prepared comments focused on his daily theme of women's issues as he highlighted his passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act and other bills in the senate. Later he took questions about how to reduce the paperwork for preschool teachers and was challenged on his fundraising success with financial interests while chairing the Senate Banking Committee.
"Money is such a contaminating influence in politics," Dodd replied, emphasizing his strong and long-lasting support for public financing of elections and arguing that he has opposed financial interests as often as he has championed them.
Another questioner asked Dodd about his support--alone among the Democratic candidates--for a carbon tax as opposed to a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions.
"Cap and trade is slow," Dodd said. "It worked for the acid rain issue, but you're basically allowing polluters to pass off their responsibility."
Clegg, Dodd's wife, offered her own response. "The real problem with cap and trade is that it actually creases a property right vested in a system that pollutes," she said. "The emphasis is on continuing the pollution."
Dodd has run a largely positive campaign, declining to criticize his Democratic opponents on many issues. When asked to make the case for why Iowans should support him in contrast to other Democrats, Dodd declined to make sharp distinctions.
"My mother always told me, 'comparisons are odious,'" Dodd said."I'll let you draw the comparisons."
He argued that he made the best choice for the presidency because of his electoral success and his record of having "taken Democratic principles and made them national policies."
"So there's some sense of assurance that I talk a lot about doing things I've suggested, but I've actually succeeded in doing them over the years," Dodd said. In the closest he came to criticizing rivals like Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Dodd said that while he was "impressed by a lot of the talk" about change, "I'd like to know that [my rivals] have actually done this."
Dodd took several questions after aides signaled for him to only answer one more question, and then talked for another quarter hour with students and townspeople. He then worked his way out, joining his young daughters outside where Grace was tying to find the constellation Orion in the night sky.
After Dodd's visit, Sen. Clinton is the only one of the major Democratic candidates to not visit the campus.
