I have kept very loose tabs on Sen. Dodd's performance over the past 3 decades. I was very satisfied with his early record and strong support of traditional Democratic values. However the man's time on the Senate Banking Committee and in particular his chairmanship when the Democrats regained control of the Senate has been extremely disappointing.

I don't necessarily believe he's had his hand in the cookie jar but he's consistently sided with big business and Wall Street over the little guy. Credit card fees are now at near usury rates, the bankruptcy "reform" of a few years ago has made it more difficult for the average person to get out from under a mountain of debt. Don't forget how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were allowed to accumulate bad loans and how the Student Loan market was virtually privatized until Pres. Obama took office and to top it off, Dodd was asleep at the switch when the mortgage meltdown and toxic assets bubble burst in 2008 sending this country into the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Sure, you can say that many other politicians and professional investors of all political stripes missed the signals leading to the collapse but that was the Sen.'s job - to be an independent observer of the financial system and not an enabler for hedge fund managers and investment brokers like AIG and Goldman Sachs to over leverage debt and create money out of thin air.

If you, dear reader, will permit me to digress, I like to believe that I was not one of those politicians who sat back and thought the economy would take care of itself [which is to some degree a philosophical distinction between modern Democrats and Republicans, i.e., what are the lessons of the Great Depression and FDR's economic recovery strategy] as during my campaign for Congress in the First District of Kansas.

I had spoken throughout the winter and spring of 2008 of the risk of economic slowdown and a return to 'stagflation' from the '70's due in part to high gas prices due to artificial market manipulation in the summer of 2007, and the lack of financial and corporate reforms following the Enron collapse (remember Ken Lay's company shut off the power to millions of southern Californians and the traders were caught on tape laughing about it before the accounting scandals (resulting in the breakup of Arthur Anderson) and individual whistle blowers revealed Enron's profits were illusory?).

I was also warning that the collapse of Morgan Stanley was not an isolated incident but revealed fundamental weakness in the way Wall Street was structured and that the American economy was propped up on the services industry and real estate market as all our manufacturing base had been shipped overseas.

I readily admit I was wrong about 'stagflation' occurring as we actually fell into a deflationary period for a while. Why we don't have rampant inflation due to the heavy borrowing of the federal government and zero percent lending to national banks by the Federal Reserve is still a mystery to me except that the Chinese keep buying Treasury notes to maintain demand for their exports high. However, I did get a sense that the macroeconomic fundamentals are still applicable when I took a vacation in Italy this summer with my wife and the U.S. dollar was worth about 40% less than the Euro from just a few years ago!

Back to Sen. Dodd, yes he missed the financial collapse of September 2008, but he did swiftly recognize that the entire financial system was at risk and worked with then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen to develop the TARP program, which I didn't think was a particularly well thought out plan (remember Paulsen's first draft was only 3 pages which was the regulatory equivalent to "trust me, I'm an expert") but at least it stabilized the situation. However, his greatest shortcoming has been in failing to make needed reforms in the more than 1 year since!

Only recently has there been a bill in the Banking Committee when Mass. Rep. Barney Frank (another disappointment to a lesser degree), Dodd's counterpart in the House, has had a proposal for some time. At the core, I feel Sen. Dodd became 'captured' or perhaps enraptured by the very industry and lobbyists he's supposed to be regulating. This isn't an uncommon phenomena for politicians of both parties but it just stings all the more when this was the guy you'd helped to get elected. I've spoken on other internet sites of the need for Sen. Dodd to step down (so I'm relieved by today's news) but it's with a heavy heart that I must say to him, "Sir, you let me down and I now have cause for more cynicism and doubt in America's future than that 17 year old campaign worker who once aspired to be like his hero."