What about Bob, part 2: Our GOP blogger calls Bob Smith at home
June 15, 2009 at 7:11 am by Dan Sullivan
Bob Smith, right (and we mean far right) back in Congress, back in the day.
By Dan Sullivan
PoHo contributor
Just when you thought the race to replace outgoing Sen. Mel Martinez couldn’t get any more complicated, a man named Bob Smith threw another wrench into the system last week.
Upon hearing about Smith’s entrance into the race, my immediate reaction was, “Who the heck is this Bob Smith? And what does he think he’s doing poking his nose into one of the most pivotal political battles within the Republican Party for the 2010 election season?”
Of course, Smith isn’t just any candidate. He was a U.S. Senator from 1990-2003, representing the state of New Hampshire. He also ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2000 against the likes of Pat Buchanan and some guy named George W. Bush.
Still, I’d never heard of him.
A few Google searches later, I found I was more familiar with Bob Smith than I realized. Flash back to campaign ‘96. Bob Dole was the man. And Bill Clinton was still brewing a big surprise for the country behind the White House curtains with the help of a young intern.
At that time, I was just a young lad who knew much less about politics and had much less interest in such matters than I do today. I was living in what is affectionately known as the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, which is in close proximity to New Hampshire, where Smith was seeking re-election. Because of said closeness, the local airwaves were saturated with advertisements both attacking and promoting Smith as well as his Democratic challenger for the U.S. Senate – Congressman Dick Swett, a man with one of the most unfortunate names in all of politics. Why he didn’t go by “Richard” is beyond me. I vaguely recall the slogan – which was frequently repeated with much enthusiasm by my schoolmates at the time – “America doesn’t need any more Dick Swett.”
You can say that again.
It still astounds me that a man with a name as memorable as Dick Swett could end up losing an election to a guy with a name as forgettable and anonymous-sounding as Bob Smith. But it did happen, albeit by a slim margin.
I wondered, could something similar happen in Florida? What was Smith doing in Florida in the first place?
In order to get some answers to these and other questions, I decided to give Smith a call at his home in Sarasota.
I started with the obvious: why are you running for U.S. Senate? His wordy answer boiled down to his lengthy prior experience – a qualification that he says puts him above his two main Republican contenders, Gov. Charlie Crist and former State House Speaker Marco Rubio.
“I think without a doubt, I’m the best qualified,” he told me. “The governor has not had that kind of experience. Nor has the former speaker of the House. I think I bring the best qualifications and I have a record on the issues for 18 years. I’m just asking the voters to take a look at that record and see if they would consider me to serve here as well.”
He noted Crist’s shift to the middle as a major source of frustration for him, making comparisons to Arlen Specter’s recent team-change and especially chiding Crist for his support of President Obama’s stimulus plan. He repeated a lot of the same rhetoric that many of my conservative friends have been saying since the ‘08 election – that the party needs to return to its conservative principles.
“There’s nothing wrong with the platform of the party,” he said. “It’s the people that are leading it left, like Charlie Crist and others, that are going to cause the collapse of the party.”
Sounds pretty good to this Republican. My biggest beef with Smith, however, came about as our discussion turned to his personal political history.
When Smith ran for president in 2000, he first entered the Republican primary, before dropping out to run as an independent. However, realizing the difficulty this would pose if he wanted to continue his work with Senate Republicans, he withdrew from the presidential race altogether, announced his return to the Republican Party and endorsed Bush for president.
“I knew I was going to risk my political career, but I (left the party) because I was trying to make the point that you’ve got to listen to conservatives,” he said. “I wanted to try to shake up the party people. Not the party itself. The Republican Party platform is what it is. It’s a set of principles and guidelines, which I strongly support. But leadership, some of those party officials, the party bureaucrat types, as well as some of the elected officials, I felt were walking away from those conservative values. And I knew that if they did and they continued to do it, that eventually they were going to take a drubbing in the polls. And eventually they did, as we saw in 2006 and 2008.”
You can’t say he’s not a man without principles. But still, a red flag went up when I learned that Smith had endorsed John Kerry in 2004. When I asked him about it, he dubbed it a “political mistake” that he made out of anger for Bush’s refusal to support him in his 2002 reelection campaign against former Bush Chief of Staff John Sununu, who later defeated Smith.
Smith’s re-election loss ultimately was what led him to retire to Florida, a place where he had vacationed in the past. Now a seven-year resident of Sarasota, he says he doesn’t want to stand by watching what he says is the country’s slow drift toward socialism. If elected, he says he would be the first Senator, in modern history at least, to have been elected from two different states.
But he’s got a long way to go if he plans to distinguish himself from the young and dynamic Marco Rubio, whose articulation of the same conservative message seems to resonate with more Republicans from a wider array of demographics. Not to mention, he would have to overcome the inexplicable monstrosity that is Charlie Crist’s popularity.
But still, stranger things have happened in politics. Just ask Dick Swett.
