Lautenberg Bulks Up Funds for ’08 Run: A Job He Loves – and Control of the U.S. Senate – Are at Stake. The GOP Field is Wide-Open
By Cynthia Burton, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Feb. 6–With legislative races this year expected to do little to tilt the balance of power in Trenton, the hottest race in New Jersey could very well be the one for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Frank Lautenberg.
Although voters will not decide the race until November 2008, Lautenberg is filling his campaign treasury, with three fund-raisers down and others planned for Palm Beach, Fla.; Austin, Texas; Denver, and Los Angeles.
Tim Yehl, Lautenberg’s chief of staff, expects the race to cost each candidate up to $15 million. That’s bad news for Lautenberg, who loves being a senator but hates the fund-raising grind.
“The best part of the job is not the fund-raising,” Lautenberg, in a recent interview, said dryly.
But Lautenberg will be hitting the road, like it or not, because the 33 Senate seats up for grabs next year will be extremely important to both parties. Democrats won a one-seat majority last year, and the 12 incumbent Democratic senators running next year will be doing their part to hold onto it.
For Lautenberg, who turned 83 on Jan. 23, that will mean turning back a Republican to be named later.
The most well-known likely Republican candidate, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, took himself out of the running last month, signaling other Republicans they could start exploring a run.
U.S. Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo, a South Jersey Republican, seems unlikely to run, though he has been mentioned on the short list of possible candidates. But Bill Baroni, a moderate GOP assemblyman who keeps winning in a Democratic-leaning Mercer County district, is paying attention to party leaders who have asked him to at least think about it.
Warren County Republican Assemblyman Mike Dougherty, a conservative, also is thinking about the possibilities.
Although many in the Republican Party believe their 2006 Senate candidate, Thomas H. Kean Jr., has a bright future, he took such a thrashing last year that he is not considered a contender this time.
On the Democratic side, some quietly hoped that Lautenberg would retire, but he’s not ready for the rocking chair on the porch.
“We’re active and pushing and organizing and doing everything you have to,” he said.
For those who would make an issue of his age, he points out that he still skis and lifts weights, and just finished a hiking trip through the mountains of Peru.
He said he plans to run on his record, including his fight against smoking in airplanes, keeping Amtrak running, the family-leave act, the school asbestos-abatement program, helping write sanctions against South Africa and Serbia, helping Israel, requiring ocean-water testing, and making carjacking a federal crime. Among his unfinished business, he includes ending the war in Iraq, funding stem-cell research, getting a third tunnel under the Hudson River, and bolstering chemical plant security.
Republicans Baroni and Dougherty also say they want to talk about issues in the forthcoming race; they are unlikely to run the kind of slash-and-burn campaign against Lautenberg that the party ran unsuccessfully against now-U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez last year. That’s mainly because Lautenberg is already a popular statewide figure, while Menendez was not well known outside his old Hudson County congressional district.
Baroni, the moderate, made his mark in the Statehouse pushing for ethics reforms and, most recently, supporting civil-union legislation.
Dougherty said he has not voted for a tax since being elected to the Assembly in 2001. He has sponsored legislation to preserve farmland and open space. A lawyer, a West Point graduate, and the father of three servicemen, Dougherty said he wanted to talk about the future of the country’s international policies. He said he would bring soldiers home from Iraq, seal U.S. borders, and give anyone who attacked this country an “overwhelming military response.”
It’s too early to say whether the GOP leaders will permit a U.S. Senate primary. This year they’re going to have their hands full with several primaries breaking out in the state legislative races; they may lose their taste for family feuding by 2008.
A millionaire who made his fortune from Automatic Data Processing Inc., a payroll company he founded in the 1950s, Lautenberg first won a Senate seat in 1982 against U.S. Rep. Millicent Fenwick.
At the time, he criticized his 72-year-old opponent as too old. Today, Lautenberg is the third-oldest senator, and would finish a new term at the age of 90.
He has run for the Senate five times, winning by 3 percentage points three times and 8 points in 1988 against another millionaire, Pete Dawkins. His biggest romp, though, was his 32-day race against another millionaire — Republican Doug Forrester — which he won by 10 points in 2002.
Lautenberg had retired in 2000, making way for yet another millionaire, Jon Corzine, to run for the Senate. But he was pulled into the Forrester race by Democratic Party bosses to take the place of U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli. At the time, Torricelli was crashing in the polls under the weight of an ethics scandal. That scandal, however, never resulted in a prosecution.
This will almost certainly be his most expensive race. Last year, Menendez and Kean, a Union County state senator, spent a combined $21 million.
Contact staff writer Cynthia Burton at 856-779-3858 or cburton@phillynews.com.
—–
Copyright (c) 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
NYSE:ADP,