Degrees of Bennett/Specter

With Specter going down to defeat last night, I get to use this one:

1960: Kennedy/Nixon, one of the closest elections in United States history. 

OK, folks, what does that have to do with Bob Bennett and Arlen Specter?  What's the connection(s)?


Ready?


Arlen Specter, as most people know, worked for the Warren Commission, and was responsible for the "single-bullet" theory that Kennedy assassination buffs know a whole lot more about than I do.

Bennett...I'll go ahead and quote Fred Emery:

Robert Bennett had left DOT to take over the Mullen Company, a public relations firm in Washington.  This was the firm where...E. Howard Hunt had been placed since he formally retired from the agency in May 1970 after twenty-seven years service.  So Hunt, who was an old chum of Colson's, and Bennett, deemed a Colson ally, were now working together.  

The gist of it is that Bennett did some work for the White House, and was part of the network that wound up with Hunt working for the White House as one of the Plumbers.  Also, Bennett  became a lobbyist for Howard Hughes, who was all over the shadows of the Watergate story.  And that's not all!  Bennett is also, according to a deposition that he gave later, the person who told Bob Woodward in the days just after the break-in that Hunt, who still had an office at the Mullen Company (and, alas for the conspirators, still had a safe at the White House, but that's a whole 'nother story) worked for the CIA.  I should add: as far as I can tell, or at least as far as the sources I have say, Bennett didn't do anything wrong in any of this.

And that, as they used to say, is the rest of the story.  Two Senators defeated in 2010; forty or so years earlier, one was involved in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, the other on the fringes of Watergate.

Specter/Bennett

Arlen Specter's possible nomination loss is huge news today -- see the NYT story and the WaPo story.  I think it's fair to say that it's attracted far more attention then Robert Bennett's possible nomination loss did before the fact.  Why?  Here are some possibilities:

1. Party-switching makes Specter big news.
2. Democratic nomination fights are inherently bigger news than GOP nomination fights.
3. Majority-party nomination fights are inherently bigger news than minority-party nomination fights.
4. Specter has had a more important Senate career than Bennett.
5. Specter is unusually visible because of his role on the Judiciary Committee and SCOTUS nominations.
6. Specter ran for president for twenty minutes once.
7. PA is a more important state than UT.
8. PA is closer than UT to NY and DC.
9. Primaries are easier to understand and explain than caucuses.
10. Primaries are easier for reporters to cover than caucuses.
11. Specter's challenger is more famous than either of Bennett's challengers.
12. PA will have a competitive general election, UT won't.
13. Specter is a showhorse, Bennett is a workhorse.
14. Reporters think that Jews are normal, but LDS are weird.
15. In some way not covered above, the Specter challenge is actually more important than the Bennett challenge.

My money is on explanations 5, 8, 10, and 13.  What do you think?

Bennett Down

[See Bigger Update, below]

I'd say that the defeat of Robert Bennett for renomination to the Senate at the Utah state party convention qualifies as fairly big news.

Looking at Roll Call's Casualty Lists, the most recent Senator to leave because she couldn't get her party's nomination was Sheila  Frahm.  Sheila who, you say?  Gotta be a pretty good political junkie to remember this one: she was Bob Dole's replacement when he resigned from the Senate during his presidential run in 1996.  She was appointed on June 11, and lost a primary to Sam Brownback on August 6, so it's not as if she was exactly an established Senator.  Before that, it was Alan Dixon of Illinois, defeated in 1992 by Carol Mosely Braun.  So Bennett will be the first elected Senator denied renomination in almost twenty years.  Which means it's been almost twenty years since an elected Senator left the Senate after being denied renomination.  And before that, it didn't happen since 1980, when four (!) Senators were defeated, including Jacob Javits of New York and Mike Gravel of Alaska.  So it's fair to say that what happened to Bennett today is unusual.

(You'll recall, of course, that Joe Lieberman lost a primary election in 2006 and was reelected anyway; I don't recall that happening to any other Senator over the last thirty years, but if it did it wouldn't show up in the Roll Call files I was looking at).

A couple of other things...

You'll note that 1992 (Dixon) and 1980 (Javits, Gravel, and two others) have something else in common with 2008: they're all recession years.  That's surely no coincidence.  It isn't going to stop anyone from treating this as ideological enforcement, and that's probably one reasonable interpretation, but in fact I strongly suspect that the real causal factor here is the recession.

Also, turnover in Utah is definitely going to help the next Senate finally break a string of record old Senates.  Bennett is 76; the two GOP candidates who are going forward to a primary are 49 (Tim Bridgewater) and 38 (Mike Lee).  It's not quite a sure thing yet that the 112th Senate will be younger than the 111th Senate, but I think it's very likely.

(Update: This all assumes he's done; apparently there's some possibility that he'll run a write-in campaign).

(Bigger Update:  Steve Kornacki got there first, and got one that I missed: Bob Smith in 2002.  Smith was an odd case, to say the least.  In the course of his term leading up to the 2002 election, he left the Republican Party, only to return in time for the primary.  Well, not really in time, since he lost to the younger John Sununu.  And for what it's worth -- not much, I'd say, but still I'll mention it -- 2002 was also a post-recession year).

Another Senator's Strings Cut?

I've blogged quite a bit about Senator George LeMieux (R-Crist), and whether Charlie Crist's apparent immanent departure from the GOP nomination contest might affect LeMieux's votes in the Senate.  I haven't, however, posted anything about another intriguing case.  Senator Bob Bennett is apparently in deep trouble for his own renomination.  As David Weigel explains, under Utah rules if any candidate receives 60% of the vote at the state party convention, that's it: that candidate is the nominee, and the primary election is canceled.   And it seems that polling of the delegates indicates that it's a real possibility that first-time candidate Mike Lee might be able to do that   We'll know on May 8; if Lee can't shut the thing down, it goes to a primary on June 22.

Bob Bennett, a second-generation Senator, has always seemed to me to be about as close to the ideal regular conservative Republican as you can get, but for whatever reasons Utah Republicans might be ready to give him the boot.  My question: how will he react?  Unlike LeMieux, he gives (as far as I know) absolutely no hint of having any liberal inclinations, so it's hard to believe that freedom from electoral constraints would push him to the left.  On the other hand, he certainly would have a motive for sticking it to Republicans: revenge.  The guy will be 77 by January, so it's not as if he'll be bucking for an ambassadorship from the next GOP president...

I'm not predicting anything.  Just saying that if he is defeated on May 8 or on June 22, it might be worth keeping an eye on how he reacts.