Dodd’s allies suggest that his prominence in virtually all the top domestic policy debates of the moment is just the natural result of his high-ranking positions on the Banking and HELP panels, at a time when both are staging grounds for so much of the current legislative agenda. “He just happens to be in the right position to help with these critical issues,” said Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois. Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who used to be Dodd’s chief of staff, said he’s “in the right place at the right time with a new president and majorities in the House and Senate” for the Democrats. “And these issues are becoming full-blown.”

There’s also another consideration that’s hard to miss in accounting for Dodd’s new stature: He’s facing by far the roughest campaign of his career. Although he’s won his Senate seat five times by double-digit margins, and secured his current term in 2004 with two-thirds of the vote, he’s trailing in the polls behind his likely Republican challenger next year: Rob Simmons, who served in the House from 2001 through 2006. Dodd’s approval ratings only recently bounced back from record lows; a Quinnipiac University poll last month found that 53 percent of Connecticut voters disapprove of the job Dodd is doing, down only slightly from a 58 percent disapproval rating in April.

Dodd’s slide in popularity at home has multiple causes, but it started with his run for last year’s Democratic presidential nomination, when he relocated his wife and two daughters to Des Moines for two months. (He dropped out of the race after receiving almost no support in the Iowa caucuses.) The move may have helped keep his family together during the campaign, but it “started the rumblings here about whether he’s lost touch with the state,” said Gary Rose, a political science professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. “He just didn’t seem to have an interest in Connecticut anymore.”

Then Dodd’s approval ratings took a steep dive last year after news reports suggested that he received preferential treatment from Countrywide Financial when he refinanced two mortgages through the company in 2003. “He waited a long time to disclose his mortgage documents” to put the controversy to rest, and when he did, he still drew negative coverage because of restrictions he placed on the media’s access to them, said Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac poll.

His ratings started to recover but then plummeted again this spring when, after initially maintaining that he wasn’t involved, Dodd admitted he had carried out an administration request to include a provision in the economic stimulus package that effectively allowed American International Group Inc. to pay bonuses to executives and other employees. The payments outraged the public and became a symbol of waste in the federal bailout program, since the company had received $180 billion in aid from taxpayers.

Given that all of these controversies have eroded the trust of Dodd’s constituents, the best road to recovery might be exactly the path he’s taking: Try to build a fresh record of consumer-friendly accomplishments, and make sure everyone sees you doing it. That’s not why Dodd says he’s taking on so many issues, and he insists he’ll happily hand the health care bill back to Kennedy whenever he’s well enough to return. But Dodd acknowledges that a record of success could help convince his constituents that he’s been tangibly helpful in improving their lives.

“My political issues back home are real,” said Dodd, but “I really do think that you just have to do your job. Tough elections are nothing. Tough is losing your job. Tough is losing your home.” If his constituents are convinced he has been working hard to solve problems in their lives, he said, “the election will take care of itself.”

Multiple Tasks at Warp Speed

The workload has the white-haired, 65-year-old Dodd darting around the Capitol at a frenetic pace. On one day two weeks ago, Dodd started a briefing on the health care bill for his HELP panel colleagues but then left after a few minutes, handing the reins to Democrat Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland and heading to a different health care meeting, with Obama at the White House.

Returning to the Capitol, he worked the Senate floor during a procedural vote on the tobacco bill and then went to the Banking panel’s hearing room to preside at a hearing on the auto industry restructuring. (His verdict: Taking an ownership share may have been needed to prevent further job losses, but “I’d like us to be out of this business yesterday.”) He stuck around long enough to question the witnesses, then handed the gavel to Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown — and dashed back to the HELP Committee health care briefing.

Dodd says he can handle the multitasking, and that the weight of the work isn’t entirely on his shoulders. He said that Mikulski and three other HELP Democrats — Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Patty Murray of Washington — have been working on different sections of the health bill and that Kennedy’s aides have played a big part as well. “This is not the job for one person,” Dodd said. “I happen to be the Banking Committee chairman, and I’m working on Sen. Kennedy’s behalf, but the job involves a lot of other people.”

Still, working on a bill as complex as the health overhaul — or the stimulus bill, in which Dodd was also one of the major players — requires close attention; otherwise problems can arise out of nowhere and become full-blown crises. That’s what seems to have happened with the AIG bonuses. The Treasury Department asked Dodd to change the limits on executive compensation so they wouldn’t apply to existing contracts, and Dodd later said he thought it was just a technical fix, not a change that would permit AIG to pay the controversial bonuses. But once the company paid the money, Connecticut’s residents put most of the blame on him, even though he had originally proposed executive compensation limits that were criticized as too tough.

Financial Reckonings

For the next several weeks, Dodd will be living and breathing health care policy. He vows to keep pressing forward and downplays any suggestion that recent missteps may have thrown up significant obstacles. He noted that the CBO conceded that its estimate reflects incomplete information about the measure. What’s more, Dodd argues, a public option would probably bring down costs, once included, and the CBO should have taken into account more of the potential cost savings from provisions to boost preventive care. In addition, a complete bill would probably cover more of the uninsured because the Democrats plan to expand Medicaid — an issue to be tackled by the Finance Committee, not the HELP Committee.

But however the health debate plays out, Dodd will have to turn back to his Banking Committee work this fall in time for the next major item on Obama’s agenda: overhauling the financial regulatory system to avoid a repeat of the economic meltdown. Dodd says his main goal will be to push the creation of an independent consumer protection agency that would regulate credit and bank products and protect consumers from abusive financial practices — taking away the rulemaking authority of the Federal Reserve.

“We need to start getting back to the basics” of showing that the federal government can regulate the financial system well, said Dodd. “The Fed is one set of eyes on the problem, but what happened is that we didn’t have enough sets of eyes on it from different perspectives.”

Obama proposed much the same kind of agency last week. But Dodd questioned the wisdom of the administration officials weighing in so early in what’s bound to be a complicated and hard-fought process. “I might have preferred that they would have waited,” Dodd said. “I’m worried that by the time we get to this, it might have been so thoroughly picked over” that opponents will have plenty of time to mobilize against the proposal.

As much as Dodd says he’s looking forward to the health debate — “it’s about as big as it gets” — financial regulation might be even more important to his political fortunes. Rightly or wrongly, constituents will doubtless ask whether he was asleep at the wheel as Banking chairman when the economic collapse happened last year — and Simmons will almost certainly make that question a centerpiece of his campaign. “He is an incumbent, and the economy has declined dramatically, and incumbents generally are being held accountable for that,” said Rose of Sacred Heart University.

Dodd’s heavy reliance on campaign support from the financial and insurance industries doesn’t help to dispel such perceptions. So far this year, finance and insurance concerns have contributed $71,000 to his re-election campaign, second only to organized labor; in the previous two years, finance and insurance concerns were by far his biggest industry benefactors, at $211,700. Still, Dodd has already started to resuscitate his profile as a consumer crusader with his work on the credit card law, which intends to shield consumers from a variety of interest rate increases and fees, and a remaking of the financial regulatory structure could help him at home, as well.

And in a solidly Democratic state such as Connecticut, where Obama is very popular, a prominent role in the health care overhaul could boost Dodd’s standing significantly. “Everything we’ve seen so far is encouraging,” said Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now, a coalition of progressive groups pushing for universal health care. “He’s clearly working as Sen. Kennedy’s agent and promoting what Sen. Kennedy believes in.” For Connecticut voters who remain skeptical about whether Dodd really has their interests in mind, Kirsch said, his role in the health care effort “is probably the biggest thing he could do to erase those doubts.”

“Yes, his seat’s in jeopardy, but by no means is it a done deal,” said Rose. “I think he can make a comeback.” For that to happen, Dodd will have to hope for the same kinds of breakthroughs on health care and financial regulation that he’s had on other bills so far this year. And he’ll have to keep his eye on all the balls he has in the air.