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December
2, 2002, 8:30 a.m. By Jim Geraghty |
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Sen. Jon Corzine, his expected promotion to chairman of the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee is a double-edged sword.
The upside for the New Jersey multimillionaire is that after only three years in the political arena, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle sees him as capable of handling one of the party's most important jobs. The downside is that the electoral landscape that Corzine and the Democrats will face in 2004 is likely to be at least as unfavorable as it was in 2002.
Right now, Democrats need to pick up two seats to regain the majority, and could need three if Sen. Mary Landrieu can't fend off GOP challenger Suzanne Tyrell in the Dec. 7 runoff in Louisiana.
Of the senators up for reelection in 2004, 19 are Democrats and 15 are Republicans. Eight of the 19 seats Democrats will be defending are in states George W. Bush carried in 2000. Democrats are worried that Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, who will be 82 years old on Election Day 2004, may retire.
Daschle is also reported to be thinking of retiring or not seeking reelection to the Senate while running for president. South Dakota's seat would be a difficult open seat to defend in a presidential year with Bush at the top of the GOP ticket. Bush won the state by 22 percentage points in the last presidential election. Corzine has dismissed a Daschle retirement as "not likely."
(One Democratic bright spot is vulnerable Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, a conservative in a state that Gore carried by 12 points in 2000. Democrats swept almost all of the statewide offices this year.)
Besides his own Senate victory, Corzine comes to the job with one strategic win under his belt, also in his home state. When his fellow New Jersey Democrat Bob Torricelli withdrew from his Senate race, Corzine — along with Daschle — pushed for former Sens. Bill Bradley or Frank Lautenberg over lesser-known alternatives. Lautenberg got the nod, and the win.
Corzine doesn't appear to buy the argument that Democrats need to revamp their message, either to the left or the center, before 2004.
"I hope we can run an issue-based effort, one that Democrats do define the differences between us and the Republicans," Corzine said in a recent interview on C-SPAN. "If we do that on the economy, on health care, and retirement security and we're supportive of those good things about protecting the nation both at home and abroad, I think we can take a message to the American people and be very successful."
Corzine's mantra is likely to be a familiar one — that Democrats look out for the public interest, while Republicans represent special interests. While Corzine is far from a budget hawk, he doesn't hesitate to cite pork-laden bills as examples of GOP mismanagement, like the final version of the Homeland Security bill.
"We're not for special interests," Corzine said, "or loading up every piece of legislation that's a responsible piece of legislation in the homeland-security area with special-interest issues."
Will Corzine make an effective party spokesman? In an interview with the Associated Press, Corzine said that he and Torricelli made an effective team despite differing styles. He called Torricelli a "flamethrower" while he provided "a sort of a quiet Gary Cooper in contrast."
The former chairman of Goldman Sachs earned generally positive grades in his role as a Democratic leader on corporate scandals — despite reports that Corzine's former firm contributed to Enron's collapse by creating and marketing a financial instrument that the failed energy trader used to hide debt between 1993 and its collapse.
"He's gotten a lot of exposure from taking on the corporate corruption issue," says Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the "Cook Political Report." "In some ways, this terrible economic disaster has been a blessing to Jon Corzine. Unless you're Hillary Clinton, it's hard to make your mark in the Senate in two years and this was an avenue for Corzine to do that."
"Nobody's ever accused [Corzine's predecessor at the DSCC, Sen.] Patty Murray of having a lot of charisma," says political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. "Nobody's ever accused [former chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee] Mitch McConnell of being a television personality. I think Corzine will be fine."
Corzine's big challenge will be keeping the Democrats competitive under the new campaign-finance rules that ban soft money — large, unregulated contributions to the parties used on issue ads and other party-building measures. In 2002, the DSCC raised $96 million and its Republican counterpart raised $59 million.
"Corzine's in charge of the 12-step program to get the Democrats off of soft money," Duffy says. "It's a tough cycle to be the chairman. The party is going to have to rely on hard money and its candidates are going to have to campaign differently."
One obvious solution for Corzine is to emulate the strategy used by then-DSCC Chair Torricelli in 2000, which relied heavily on Democratic candidates who could self-finance their campaigns. That year Minnesota's Mark Dayton in Minnesota spent $8.6 million of his own money and Washington's Maria Cantwell spent $7.5 million of her fortune to unseat GOP incumbents, while Corzine spent about $60 million — about $20 for each vote he received.
"Corzine's a man of great personal wealth, and wealthy people tend to know other wealthy people," Rothenberg says.
Corzine is also likely to help out candidates with maximum donations from his personal wealth, estimated to be between $300 million to $400 million. During his first year in office, Corzine doled out nearly $2.8 million in contributions — all but a sliver of it from his own wallet — to federal and state candidates, party committees, and other political organizations, according to a Roll Call analysis of state and federal records.
"A lot of the expectations game that Senator Corzine will face depends on how Bush is perceived over the next 12 to 18 months and how the retirements go," Rothenberg says. "But right off the bat there ought not to be great expectations for the Democrats about 2004."
— Jim Geraghty, a reporter for States News Service, covers Washington for the Bergen Record of New Jersey.