Nomination Scrabble: Chris Dodd

Note: This is the second in my series assesssing the prospects of various Democrat and Republican candidates for securing their party's nomination.

Connecticut's senior Senator, Democrat Christopher Dodd, likes to joke that he is the only presidential candidate who receives mail from both the AARP and diaper services. He's right that he's the only candidate in this position. At the age of 62, Dodd is a very proud father of a toddler and an infant. The way that he has talked about becoming a parent is one of the reasons that I like him so much.

Dodd served in the Peace Corp in the 1960s and after two years in the Dominican Republic he served in the Army National Guard. Those are his Vietnam War credentials and they measure up nicely with other Democrats in the pool. Dodd was first elected to Congress in 1974 and he advanced to the Senate in 1980. He's been there ever since, which makes him a Washington insider. But the other Democrats in the mix are also Washington insiders, albeit being "inside" for a shorter period.

In Congress Dodd has long been active on foreign affairs, healthcare for the poor, and job opportunities programs. He' a man with an admirable and impressive track record on children's issues, ranging from healthcare to childhood nutrition, to daycare, and pushing for Head Start expansion. His record is pure gold in this area and far surpasses any of the other Democrats in the mix, including Clinton. He's long been fiscally responsible, a desirable match-up with any of the GOP candidates who might claim this mantle (do Republicans care about a balanced budget anymore?).

I like Chris Dodd. I respect Chris Dodd. Dodd is solid and experienced and his judgment is sound. I think that he is a terrific leader and I would be thrilled to cast a presidential ballot for him in November 2008. But it ain't gonna happen. For starters, members of Congress, who often vote strategically to accomplish complicated political goals, have a notoriously difficult time explaining this to the average Joe and Josephine Voter, and Dodd's been in Congress for more than 30 years. This will be a challenge, and no one wants to be labeled as a waffler. Second, he's going to have a hard time raising money in the juggernaut that is presidential campaign financing in a terrifically front-loaded primary. He can't match the star power of either Obama or Hilary and it will hurt him. He doesn't have their name recognition, either, and so crowd power won't make up for lack of zillions of dollars. He's articulate and thoughtful in his rhetoric but he doesn't ooze charisma and is nothing close to a media darling like Obama. Connecticut, Dodd's home state, doesn't confer any significant political advantages. He's a well-respected Democrat from the most Democratic part of the nation. Big deal.

What Chris Dodd has is vice presidential credentials. He would mesh well with current front-runners Obama or Clinton. They are colleagues in the Senate now and by all accounts have respect for one another. He wouldn't bring a strategic advantage to a Clinton-Dodd ticket, since their states are next-door neighbors. But in 1992 another candidate named Clinton chose the senator from the state-next-door for his ticket and that worked out just fine. He would bring regional balance to an Obama-Dodd ticket, and some significant experience that Obama lacks. I think that an option on Blair House is Dodd's best prospect for 2008. And I take some consolation that we seem to be living in an era when vice presidential influence is on the rise. That makes Dodd an eminently desirable candidate.

Sunday Scribblings: Inspiration

Part of the beauty of teaching is that you get to do things over again. A successful lesson can be repeated the next year; a failed lesson can be revised for greater success the next time around. I've always loved that challenge. In the last few years, I've felt inspired to help my students to see history from the point of view of real people. It's easy to make people excited about the lives of people like Jane Addams or George Washington, but I want them to see a fuller kind of history in the lives of the rest of us.

To that end, I use a collection of historical letters that are available online at the Gilder Lehrman Institute. My students read them and we talk about the ways that the letters reflect the experiences of real people in history. I like them to see that history isn't a series of distant events or might-have-beens, but rather real events that happened to real people. And the documents are intended to serve as an inspiration to let their imaginations take flight. After we read them, I ask the class to imagine themselves as a figure in history and then write a letter to loved ones reflecting on their experience with a moment in time.

This afternoon I read the letters my current U.S. History class wrote as they imagined themselves caught up in the Civil War. I've done this assignment before but this year's class really excelled. I read letters by imaginary nurses in field hospitals, average soldiers struggling with the horror of battles like Shiloh or Gettysburg, and wives left home to tend the farms and raise children. And in the work of my students I see imagination, a real knowledge, and a growing understanding of what the Civil War really meant to Americans who lived through the experience.

We'll do a similar assignment when we study World War I and I can't wait to see what they will be inspired to write. Their work makes me excited to do what I do, an inspiration of its very own.

Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

At 6:35 am this morning my phone rang. That can only mean one thing: snow day. Though I don't want to complain and a snow day is always welcome, I had already showered, dressed, made my bed, drank two cups of coffee, made the lunches, and was unloading the dishwasher when the call came.

A more perfect storm would have found me in bed when the call came.

Though, since I am making this post from bed, I know that I really shouldn't complain.

Real Life Conversations at School

At my school, seniors may be exempt from final exams if they have an A in the fourth quarter. Faculty may tinker with this formula, and I mess with it by requiring that all work in the fourth quarter be submitted on time (this in addition to having an A average). So, with the fourth quarter just a few weeks away I was explaining this situation to my 3rd period class, a group with a few notorious late-work submitters. And the following conversation happened:

J: "Wait.....can we get some kind of repercussion?"

K: "J, repercussions are BAD."

My work here is complete.

The Kitty Middle Finger

I read somewhere that cats don't like to walk on tin foil and my cat-owning friends have confirmed this fact. So I decided I would leave a few sheets of tin foil on my kitchen counter and the cats would stay away. Life would be happier.

But, as the photo indicates, the cats pretty much gave me the kitty middle finger.

It's patently clear who is in command at my house.

New Desks!

I returned from spring break to find my classroom filled with new desks. This has made me unaccountably joyful, as I will no longer have to warn teenage boys that the desk will in fact break if they continue to sit on it that way. My old desks had the broken spirits of desks worn down by years of teenage abuse. On occasion, they tossed a 16 year old on his bootie, always entertaining for the class, though not always conducive to learning. The new desks are nice and shiny and quite durable. The students feel that I am unreasonably happy about them, guarding them like a mama watching over her flock of chicks. I am most happy that there is no basket underneath them, which I have foolishly persuaded myself means that no one will leave their books, jackets, or purses behind in my class. And I won't miss the sound of metal grinding against metal, because the desk has been rocked backward one too many times.

Clearly, I am a hopeless idealist.

A Tiny (Shopping) Miracle

When Lisa walked out last summer, I pitched the perfume that she had bought for me. I assume that the reasons for the perfume pitching are abundantly obvious. I promptly picked out a new scent, a leafy green bottle of something called Beleaf (pun intended, I believe). I liked it because it was something new that I had had chosen, not something new and horrible that had been foisted upon me.

I still like it and I dropped by The Body Shop this afternoon to pick up a new bottle and was confronted by the fact that it has been discontinued. Horrors. Then the clerk said she had a few bottles at the low, low price of $2. I bought all three.

Hallelujah.

In Praise of the Elliptical Trainer

This week I have been reading A Walk in the Woods, one of my favorite Bill Bryson books. It's his book about the Appalachian Trail, written after he hiked portions of it in 1996. I love the book first and foremost for his reflections on the American notions of wilderness. Plus the book is startlingly funny....such that I sometimes have to set it down because I'm laughing so hard. Bryson first takes to the trail with a friend and neither of them are the least bit physically prepared for the journey. I like that they persevere anyway. It speaks volumes to me.

For most of my 39 years I have had a love-hate relationship with my own body, with emphasis on the hate. When Lisa and I were first together she made me feel great about my body, though she soon commenced with the criticism and was sometimes worse than the previous record-holder in body criticism, my mother. I got into pretty good shape to be pregnant and was a vigilant pregnant woman, gaining less than 20 pounds. And pregnancy and delivery was really the first time that I liked my body ---- I could do this? It felt empowering. Subsequently, I got more interested in working out, no longer for the benefit of how I looked but finally for the way that being strong made me feel.

So now I am a junkie, running nearly every day on my elliptical trainer. Burning calories and building muscle and keeping my blood pressure low, low, low. I like the challenge of running faster or at a harder pace. I like the hot sweaty feel of pushing myself to do more. I like that all that running means that I can bike for miles, pulling my boy behind me. I like that I can keep pace with my lightening quick 7-year-old son. I like that people are surprised at how fit I am (because for all my working out, I am no scrawny girl and I still like butter on my bread). I like the fact that working out has given me a much healthier relationship with food.

I've always liked to joke that my body is built for comfort and not for speed and that's still largely true. But when speed ---- or perseverance ---- is called for, I can deliver. And I like that.

Live from Orlando

So I am standing in line at airport security with half of the world and we are all or us taking off our belts, removing our jewelry and shoes, unpacking our bags and confessing that yes, we do have more than three ounces of Purell in our bags. And then, clad in our socks, and holding up our pants, we walk through metal detectors like cattle to the slaughter. On the other side we reassemble ourselves.

And I find myself thinking that we are the nation who freed the world from the tyranny of the Nazis and then put a man on the moon. Great accomplishments. But now we've sunk to this lame and irrational behavior at airports. What could we possibly get from this behavior?

I mean other than feeling like the fools that we have become.

Dream Journey

My whole life, I have been an active daydreamer. Most often, my daydreams have featured my future. I dreamt about having a child and being a parent long before he was actually born; I can remember walking through the woods years ago in Nashville dreaming about having a house of my own. I think that I have always planned and prepared for my future through daydreams.

In the years that Lisa and I were together, I daydreamed about our future: places we would go together, things that we would do. I had a very active daydream about running a bed and breakfast that was sometimes a daily visit for me. I had planned a trip to England for Lisa's 40th birthday. When Lisa first left, I frantically tried to close off the pain by retreating to my daydreams only to find that they hurt as well. For years I had been spinning daydreams about a future for she and I but there was no us anymore, and no future to go with it. And so what was once a familiar place to take comfort was now just new area of pain in my life. My daydream factory was suddenly shut down.

I quit daydreaming about the future because it hurt so much and because for the first time in years I had no idea what the future might bring. And, frankly, I was so busy trying to manage the here and now that I couldn't really envision the future. I wasn't even sure that I wanted a future.

But this week I realized that very slowly my daydreaming life is coming back. For the last few weeks, I've daydreamed about my upcoming vacation in Florida. I've also daydreamed about camping in the Cape this summer. It's not far into the future, but it is a future, which feels like a huge step forward.