After Blumenthal, a new mission?

Hartford - The last time the state of Connecticut inaugurated a new attorney general, the lead story around the world was the last-ditch effort by officials at the United Nations to avoid a war with Iraq.

The first war with Iraq.

Since that day, Jan. 9, 1991, the pre-eminent legal bully pulpit in Connecticut has been filled by Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who has led high-profile battles against tobacco companies and power plant polluters, charmed fellow Democrats and infuriated some Republicans with attention to even the most obscure of consumer protection issues, and shaped the mission and priorities of the office to fit his own.

Now, as voters consider whether to elect Blumenthal to the U.S. Senate, a trio of lawyers are quietly duking it out to succeed him in an office that has been filled - if not personified - by one man for a generation.

Republican Martha Dean, whom Blumenthal dismantled in a re-election run in 2002, faces off in a primary Aug. 10 against Ross Garber, a veteran attorney who served most prominently as counsel to the Office of the Governor under Gov. John G. Rowland, including during the impeachment inquiry that helped prompt his resignation.

Waiting on the other side of the primary line will be Democrat George Jepsen, a labor lawyer and former state party chairman who has also served as the state Senate majority leader.

At issue in the race that is unfolding - including in the increasingly nasty primary fight between Garber and Dean - is not just the future occupant of the photo-cluttered office at 55 Elm St.

It's also the question of what the job means, and whether the next attorney general will be doing the same job Blumenthal has defined for himself.

A testy primary

Even a few days before the Republican Convention in May, Dean appeared to have a clear path to the party's nomination. The Avon attorney had been organizing for months, securing support from town committees and party higher-ups.

But Garber's decision to jump into the race just before the convention appeared to upset some of that momentum.

(Two other Republicans also sought the nomination but failed to get the 15 percent of convention delegates necessary to qualify for the primary.)

The primary pits Dean, pledging to follow a platform of "Freedom, Faith, and Fortune" and deploy "SWAT teams" of attorneys to review and close pending lawsuits in the attorney general's backlog of cases, against Garber, who has stressed his experience with government investigations and representation of state agencies, the nuts and bolts of the attorney general's traditional responsibilities.

The closer they get to the primary, however, the testier the race has become.

Garber has pointed reporters to some of Dean's less doctrinaire positions, including a speech in which she said she would "advocate firearms training for boys and girls in schools, in Scouts, at camp, and elsewhere," and an interview with radio host Vinnie Penn in which Dean said she had come around to opposing capital punishment, even in the case of the two defendants charged with murdering the wife and daughters of Cheshire doctor William Petit.

"As much as I would love to see them both dead - and if it happened in the course of events that day, nobody would be sorry - but I truly think that we have to stand firm that we are not going to be in the death business, unless it's war or self-defense," Dean said in that interview, which is posted on her campaign website.

Other positions of Dean's have disappeared from her website since Garber began to mention them, including a call for "a serious debate about decriminalizing drug use" and a pledge to operate according to Judeo-Christian values that posit "a higher duty to God's law when it conflicts with the laws of government."

Dean accused Garber of "gutter politics" when he raised some of those past position statements last week in a debate broadcast on NBC-30, and said in an interview that Garber's criticism was intended to distract supporters from the rest of her platform.

"The Republican challenger has tried to gain traction with red herrings that try to create issues where there are no issues," Dean said. "He tried to raise my Second Amendment speech as an issue. And I will always vigorously uphold the Constitution, and I don't distinguish between parts of the Constitution. It's all important."

For his part, Garber said after the NBC-30 debate that he was "concerned" that Dean had misstated her positions on some issues, including the death penalty. (In the TV appearance, Dean told moderator Tom Monahan that she would support the death penalty in the Cheshire case.)

Dean has also insisted that the death penalty is "not an attorney general issue" in Connecticut, where the office has no criminal jurisdiction.

But that doesn't square with the most recent use of Connecticut's death penalty statute. In fact, Blumenthal played a key role in the frenzied hours before the 2005 execution of serial killer Michael Ross, including arguing before a three-judge panel at the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York to block an effort by Ross' father to halt the execution.

"My opponent has talked about advancing her personal policy positions," Garber said. "I don't think that's the job of attorney general. I want to represent the people of Connecticut, and the state of Connecticut, and I don't think my personal policy agenda should have anything to do with it.

"The role of attorney general is to enforce the law and give state agencies advice on what the law is, not what the attorney general wants it to be," he added.

Consumer protection

The perennial criticism of Blumenthal from Republicans maintains that the attorney general is overly litigious, and that his frequent forays before cameras to announce lawsuits against all manner of bad actors are the true source of his high name recognition and remarkable margins of victory every four years.

But that doesn't mean that Republicans hoping to retake the office for the first time since 1959 (the year, Dean likes to note, in which she was born) are necessarily going to walk away from the areas in which Blumenthal has focused much of his effort, including consumer protection actions and defending the state's interests against federal utility regulators.

Garber, in an interview, said he would retain the current focus on consumer protection, though he stressed that he would use his background in government investigations work, both as a defense attorney and representing state entities as he did under Rowland, to more readily seek settlements rather than pursue litigation.

"My approach is going to be just as aggressive (as Blumenthal's) in addressing issues of wrongdoing," Garber said. "We're obviously not going to tolerate fraud or abuse. But number one, my approach won't be to start off by holding a press conference or by filing a lawsuit. I view those things as last resorts. What I want to do is have people comply with the law, and if the law is broken, I want to see corrective measures."

Dean has pledged to turn her lawyer "SWAT teams" on the attorney general's backlog of cases, dropping any that are "unsupported by the facts and unsupported by the law."

The biggest procedural difference Dean described was in what she called the "gray area," where companies or other entities have run afoul of the law in ways she considers ambiguous. In those cases, Dean said, "we need to give sort of a traffic ticket to the violator," rather than a full-scale lawsuit.

The Democrat

Meanwhile, Democrat George Jepsen awaits the general election.

Before Garber and Dean began duking it out, the Democrats could claim the more zany primary battle.

Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz jumped from the front of the gubernatorial field into the race for attorney general after Blumenthal announced his plan to run for the U.S. Senate, only to be bounced from the ticket by the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled that she hadn't met the state's eligibility standard of 10 years' active practice at the Connecticut bar.

Jepsen gladly announces his intention to continue the activism of Blumenthal's two decades in office, while also saying he would rely on his background in mediation to solve as many problems as possible, by "getting people around a table" rather than suing.

"I'm not a litigator first," Jepsen said. "I'm not afraid of litigation, but as a former Senate majority leader, I saw my role as solving problems and getting people around a table. I'm not contrasting myself with anybody. My first impulse when confronted with an issue is to look at all sides of it."

Jepsen added: "I'm not afraid of a fight. I'm not afraid to go toe to toe. A lot of my legislation was fought bitterly by the National Rifle Association and the religious right, so I'm not afraid to draw a line in the sand, either."

Jepsen also objected to the more conciliatory approach Dean and Garber describe, saying it would preclude some of Blumenthal's achievements of the past two decades.

"That's where I do disagree flat-out with Ross and Martha," Jepsen said. "If we didn't have an activist attorney general like Blumenthal, you wouldn't have had a tobacco settlement, wouldn't have lawsuits against coal burning plants out in Ohio that are polluting Connecticut's air. ... You can be an activist and maybe litigate less. That goes well beyond litigating. It's about his vision for the job, and I am in stark disagreement with them on that."

The activist in winter

This is what the attorney general's office looks like: a tiny clutch of camera operators and reporters gathered in the outer office on the 7th floor of 55 Elm St., waiting on a weekday morning for a Blumenthal press conference, the Connecticut flower that blooms in every season.

Chris Hoffman, one of the attorney general's two press aides, ushers the group down a hallway, through an outer office and into the vaulted room where the attorney general conducts his press conferences, as much a stage set as an office, with spotless desk, podium, the framed photographs and art of Blumenthal's children, diplomas and government commissions along the walls.

Today, the attorney general is blasting Google. After hearing reports from Europe, the attorney general's office determined that the camera trucks that traversed Connecticut's streets to record the street views included on the company's online maps were also gaining access to wireless Internet access in the homes and buildings they passed on the way.

Blumenthal stands behind the desk, practiced and calm in his delivery. Standing several feet away are two cameramen (there are no TV correspondents in person today) and two print reporters. Hoffman hovers in the back of the room, along with two members of the attorney general's staff. In the back corner is a lobbyist, watching Blumenthal's every word.

There is no lawsuit as of yet. But there is a coalition of 37 states (Connecticut is at its head, Blumenthal said) and the attorney general is announcing the release of another letter to Google's legal department demanding more answers about the information it captured, and why it had "spy software" running on its camera trucks in the first place.

The criticism of his office, his "activism" and his methods is not new to Blumenthal, and he has a ready answer. "Leading coalitions" like the one he has assembled to deal with Google, or the group of states that sued over the health care costs of tobacco use, "has enabled Connecticut to box above its weight," Blumenthal said.

Critics, particularly Republicans, like to tease him about his frequent press conferences, but Blumenthal notes that there are wide swaths of the office's business that are never publicized, or not announced until action is completed. Child protection actions are uniformly confidential. Anti-trust investigations are withheld from disclosure until action has been taken, he said.

And more often than not, Blumenthal and his staff believe they are filling a void left by the failure of the federal government to regulate harmful business practices or enforce existing laws, on everything from cigarettes to the coal smog that drifts from Midwestern power plants over Connecticut towns.

"The most compelling reason is the absence of federal protection," he said. "The federal government has been AWOL on home mortgage lending, on credit card practices, on securities issues. Tobacco. The states sued the tobacco companies because the federal government wouldn't. The vacuum created by federal inaction or inertia is being filled by the states."

The attorney general shrugged and grinned when asked, once again, about the people who criticize him for holding too many press conferences and announcing too many lawsuits from this room, which he will vacate at the end of the year.

"If public disclosure and public awareness aid in fighting for consumers or citizens, we think it serves a purpose," Blumenthal said. "The key question is results. Are they getting results? We get results."