Dodd Gets Testy

The Day reports:

“When Mark Davis, the chief political correspondent for WTNH-Channel 8, persistently questioned Dodd about his primary challenger, Merrick Alpert, and the challenger's claim that the senator shared blame for the financial crisis because of support for deregulation efforts in the 1990s, Dodd was curt.

"’I reject that argument,’ he said sharply, then looked around for the next question.”

Dodd was visiting Colonial Han-Dee Spring and trying to spread a bit of good news. Businesses have found it difficult to get credit, and Dodd was in Connecticut to assure business leaders that help is on the way from Washington, a monetary piñata: Some of the money used to bail out Wall Street has been returned to Washington, and the Obama administration intends to divert some of the returns as “loans to small businesses that have still not been able to get banks to extend them credit to continue their operations.”

That problem, said William J. Lathrop, president of Han-Dee Spring, has not affected his company, which receives credit through its parent company. But, Lathrop offered, his company is concerned Connecticut may not preserve its state-level worker training programs, and other worries torment him, such as “anything that raises costs.”

Dodd may be disappointed to learn that pretty much everything done – and left undone – by Connecticut’s Democratic leaders in the legislature raises the cost of doing business in his home state.

And then there was Davis, asking those inconvenient question, and Alpert, Dodd’s Ned Lamont, puttering through the state and hurling imprecations at the senator – not the unruffled experience Dodd is used to around campaign time.