He survived a war and a plane crash, but 84-year-old Sen. Ted Stevens (R., Alaska) may not be able to survive the seven-count indictment with which he is now faced.
Thursday, one year after federal agents raided his home in Girdwood, Alaska, the senator famed for his ability to bring earmarks and federal spending to Alaska was indicted on seven federal counts related to gifts he received from an Alaskan corporation and its chief executive officer.
Stevens’s indictment alleges that he concealed “his continuing receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of things of value” from the oil-services firm VECO and its CEO, Bill Allen. Senators are required to list gifts and honoraria on their yearly Senate financial-disclosure forms, and Stevens is accused of falsifying his for the seven years beginning in 1999. The alleged gifts included a steeply discounted automobile and $250,000 in renovations on his home in Girdwood. The indictment charges that Stevens “took multiple steps to conceal” these gifts, including lying to his staff, and that while receiving them he accepted solicitations to help VECO on a number of issues.
With his seat up for grabs this November, the question is whether Republicans have anyone capable of defeating Stevens in the primary and holding his seat for the GOP against a formidable Democratic opponent, Anchorage mayor Mark Begich.
Stevens would normally be a prohibitive frontrunner in the Aug. 26 primary, but the candidacies of his Republican opponents have suddenly gained currency with this week’s developments. Two of them are credible, both having already spent significant quantities of personal cash and both planning to spend more.
David Cuddy, the more conservative of the two, is now talked about as the favorite for the nomination. He described the Alaska Senate contest as a defining moment for the GOP. “This is a key race to figure out whether the Republicans really get it after our losses in 2006,” he told National Review Online. “Everybody looks at Ted Stevens as a poster-boy for overspending and raiding Social Security. If the national party continues to support him with the indictments, it will be a sign that no lesson was learned.”
A former state legislator and banker who challenged Stevens unsuccessfully in 1996, Cuddy describes himself as a pro-lifer and a libertarian-leaning conservative — not dissimilar to Ron Paul except for his more moderate approach to the Iraq war. “We have to stop acting as the world’s policeman, but we can’t just leave there overnight,” Cuddy said.
The other well-funded GOP candidate is Vic Vickers, a pro-choice moderate who says that immediate withdrawal from Iraq should be the Senate’s top priority. A political newcomer who has never held elected office, Vickers polled in the single digits as recently as last week, but he gained attention with his sudden and large personal expenditure on campaign commercials attacking Stevens as corrupt. Vickers says he plans to spend $750,000 of his own money on the race, held a press conference yesterday outside Stevens’s campaign headquarters, calling on the 39-year senator to resign immediately.
“I am running against him to stop corruption,” Vickers, an author and economic historian who decades ago served as an appointed Democratic official in Florida before breaking with the party in the mid-1980s, told NRO. “We’ve seen in the past, in the last days of administrations, that’s when even more sleazy deals occur. That’s why he has to resign now.”
The two men are far apart politically, but both style themselves as good-government reformers in the mold of freshman Gov. Sarah Palin (R.). A very popular conservative, Palin took on the state’s GOP establishment in 2006 over its pervasive corruption. She overwhelmingly defeated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski (R), whose chief of staff would later plead guilty to a federal conspiracy charge in March involving VECO, the same oil-services firm whose alleged gifts have landed Stevens in hot water. Shortly after Palin won her race, the feds added an exclamation point to her reform candidacy by opening multiple corruption investigations into VECO officials and raiding the offices of six Alaska state legislators (one was Stevens’s son, Ben).
The charges against Stevens are very serious and very familiar to Alaskans, who have learned much more about VECO in recent years than they ever wanted to know. Given that Alaskan television is not expensive for political ads, national Democrats are eagerly eyeing the state as a cheap pickup opportunity. Stevens was already trailing Begich, the Democratic frontrunner, by seven points in a June poll, and the indictment will not likely help his numbers.
“If Republicans want to keep control of the seat, they have to pick someone else besides Ted Stevens,” said Cuddy, voicing what has suddenly become the common wisdom in Alaska. But he added that Stevens, a World War II veteran, is not dead in this primary until and unless he drops out of the race. A seven-term senator known for his excellent constituent service, Stevens helped make Alaska the top per-capita state recipient of federal funds. He even has an airport named after him.
“He’s got 25 percent of Alaskan voters who would still vote for him if he shot the pope,” said Cuddy. “I think that I will beat him in the primary. But it might still be close.” And that won’t exactly be a cleansing moment for the GOP.
– David Freddoso is a National Review Online staff reporter.