Richard Blumenthal
Richard Blumenthal is Connecticut's Democratic attorney general. He said that he will run for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Christopher J. Dodd, who announced his retirement on Jan. 6, 2010.
Mr. Dodd had been facing an increasingly hard re-election fight in the traditionally Democratic state of Connecticut, and party officials believe Mr. Blumenthal will be a stronger candidate against a Republican attempt to win a Senate seat that has been held by Democrats for 46 years.
Mr. Blumenthal, considered a golden boy of New England politics, had been biding his time for a moment like this. He was expected to run for the seat vacated by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman when he ran for vice president in 2000, but Mr. Lieberman decided to remain on the Senate ballot as insurance. Mr. Blumenthal said in November that a 2012 run against Mr. Lieberman, now an independent, "would be a challenge that I would welcome."
While he has been waiting, Mr. Blumenthal has been re-elected five times as Connecticut's top cop. During that tenure, he attacked Microsoft, tobacco companies and H.M.O.'s in the courtroom, and he has more recently gone after auctions of the possessions of Bernard L. Madoff and credit-card rates.
Mr. Blumenthal, 63, an unfailingly decorous man whose chiseled looks are stamped with crow's feet, has for years been among the brightest of the state's political prospects. He attended Harvard and Yale Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. He was an aide to Daniel P. Moynihan when Mr. Moynihan worked for President Richard M. Nixon. From 1977 to 1981, he was the United States attorney for Connecticut; he later served in the State House and Senate.
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