True Believer Chris Dodd a Great Senate Role Model

EJ Dionne is no lover of the Senate—he thinks it should be abolished, actually—but he has to respect the faith of Chris Dodd, a venerable lawmaker and one of the chamber's fiercest advocates. Dodd, who is retiring this year, says liberals have hindered their progress by "agonizing" over failures and should be prouder of passing health care and financial reform. "We're arguing against ourselves when we say we can't get anything done," he tells Washington Post columnist Dionne.

Dodd believes the Senate functions well, he tells Dionne, but he says the Democratic majority ceded momentum to the Republicans when the Senate Finance Committee failed to find consensus on a health care bill last summer, when bipartisanship on the issue still seemed possible. "We lost all that ground, all of that momentum," Dodd said. "We gave them all this time to define the bill."