It’s been over seven months since it was revealed that Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) got a sweetheart deal on his Washington, D.C., townhouse directly from Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of troubled subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial. Participating in the “Friends of Angelo” program saved Dodd about $75,000 on his mortgage, and raised more than a few eyebrows about whether Dodd should be accepting such hefty gifts from entities he’s tasked with overseeing and regulating.
Since the scandal broke last June, no action has been taken by the Senate to formally ascertain if Dodd engaged in any wrongdoing. Nor has Dodd tried to clear his name in any way. What’s troubling about Dodd’s scandal isn’t so much that it remains unresolved but that it’s a textbook example of how scandals in Washington are swept under the rug. Indeed, Dodd’s behavior follows an utterly predictable pattern. Thus, National Review Online presents the Christopher Dodd Guide to Managing Political Scandal:
Step 1: Proclaim your innocence.
Even though an obvious conflict of interest—or even the appearance of one—causes most responsible members of the judiciary to recuse themselves from making legal rulings, very few conflicts of interest are too great to keep members of Congress from writing new laws and regulations—no matter how personally beneficial. In this case, Dodd accepted some $20,000 in campaign donations from Countrywide in addition to receiving a $75,000 mortgage break.
But should a congressman be accused of unethical behavior, the first step in any PR offensive is to proclaim his innocence. Whether what he has done is right or wrong is immaterial, as he probably hasn’t violated any laws. He’d have to be found in violation of Senate ethics rules, and, well, you’d have better luck playing Powerball.
In this case, Dodd didn’t even really try to hide his impropriety. “There ain’t much to the story,” he told the Hartford Courant. Well, if there’s anything to the story, doesn’t the public have a right to know what it is?
Step 2: Promise exculpatory evidence. Don’t keep that promise.
While it’s been seven months since the “Friends of Angelo” scandal broke, it’s been exactly 188 days since Dodd promised to release all of his pertinent mortgage documents to the public. In July of last year, Dodd told a reporter at the Courant: “Yeah, we will [release the mortgage documents] in some time.” In September he told the same reporter, “At some point I’ll get to it.” In late October, he again told the dogged Courant staffer, “Not right now. No.” That was followed by a statement from his aides saying Dodd “will release them, and he still intends to do that. He intends to do that, not at this time.” As recently as this past weekend, he told a crowd at a forum on health-care event that “at some point soon we’ll do it.”
Perhaps Dodd needs to define “soon.” Does that mean another six months?
Of course, his stalling here is just the preferred tactic for managing the media coverage of the scandal. “It’s hard for people in the media to keep writing stories when there’s nothing new to report. Which of course they count on. You get through the bad news cycle and there’s nothing new to report and people can’t keep writing the same thing every day,” Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told National Review Online. “The pressure fades and people in Dodd’s position know their constituents forget about it.”
Step 3: Hide Behind Your Fellow Congressmen.
One of the excuses Dodd has given for not releasing his mortgage papers is that they are under review by the Senate Ethics Committee.
“This excuse that the ethics committee is looking at them does not preclude him from releasing the documents,” Sloan said. “What precludes him from releasing the documents is that there’s going to be more stories about him and it might not look so good.”
While the press and constituents badger Senator Dodd to account for his mortgage, Dodd insists that he doesn’t need to be held publicly accountable because his peers in the Senate are going to make sure that everything is on the up and up.
So when is the Senate Ethics Committee expected to pass judgment on Dodd, you ask?
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