All in the Family: Jackie Dodd

Had it not been for a Utah fund-raiser and bad knee, Chris and Jackie Dodd might never have become a couple.

“It was almost 20 years ago and I was helping a senator named Jake Garn of Utah put together a charity event in Park City,” Jackie said. “It was called the Senator’s Ski Cup, an event that raised money for the Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City.

“The second year, [Chris] was attending, but he had not skied in about 20 years and had a bad knee. Senator Garn was a Republican from Utah, but he was friends with Chris so he said to me, ‘You use to ski a lot. Will you please make sure he gets down this mountain safely?’ So, I was assigned to teach him how to take gates, racing down the course that became the very bottom part of the 2002 Olympic course.”

Jackie, a native of Utah, said even if she and the Connecticut Senator had been previously acquainted in Washington, D.C. where they both worked, she would have not considered approaching him.

“We met at the charity event and it was great because it was a wonderful equalizer,” she said. “I had been in Washington for about five years and had never met him. I never would have thought about going out with him in Washington. I was a lowly staffer and, certainly, would barely talk to a senator under those circumstances.”

Jackie had been working in the beltway for five years on defense appropriations, foreign policy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Although Chris was serving in the United States Senate at that time, the two hadn’t had opportunity to work together on an issue.

“I was very active in public policy,” she said. “I was very interested in foreign relations and defense work. From the time I was a little kid, I was reading newspapers, and my grandfather would always call and ask what the scuttlebutt was. You always had to have an answer for him so you learned how to pick up a newspaper and know what was going on in the world.”

Jackie served for more than a decade in a wealth of national legislative positions. She was an assistant for foreign policy, trade and issues of national security for Garn. She served as an associate staff member to the Appropriations Committee and as a professional staff member on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy.

In May of 1997 she was nominated by President Bill Clinton as vice chairwoman and first vice president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. She was confirmed the following month and, 18 months into her tenure, she became the bank’s chief operating officer.

Given that she came into the relationship with her own political credentials, did Jackie find the prospect of beginning a relationship with a sitting United States Senator unnerving?

“Oh, that was still scary,” she said with a full smile and laugh. “I had never thought about becoming the spouse of or the girlfriend of… that wasn’t in my game plan. So, the whole idea of it was scary with all the loss of privacy that goes along with it. You know, you can toil in the vineyards of public policy for decades and never have to really stick your neck up and get your head chopped off. It was really scary — sometimes it still is.”

The couple began dating after their “equalizing” encounter on the Utah slopes and continued their relationship for over 11 years before getting married.

“Did I mention his whole family is Irish?” she asked. “Although they’ve been in the United States since 1850s and 1870s, he comes from a very Irish family. And, the Irish just aren’t that quick to marry. They take a long time to make up their minds. He likes to say it took him a decade to convince me. But I know he can keep a secret because we were engaged for about two years before we married and we didn’t tell anyone.”

The couple’s relationship throughout Chris’s re-elections to the Senate have provided Jackie with opportunities, both as a girlfriend and a wife, to play a role in campaigning.

“I had been around three of his Senate races,” she said. “I had been dating him for over four years during the first race in 1992 and was much more able to stay in the background. People knew who I was, but I was able to do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work — like ad campaigns and debate preparation. It was the same thing really in 1998. I was not someone they were looking to quote on policy at all. I think I may have been in a couple of articles where they were giving his biography where it was said that he’s been dating this woman forever.”

During the 2004 campaign, Jackie was pregnant with the couple’s youngest daughter, Christina, and had their three-year-old daughter, Grace, at home.

“I was pregnant, but I was also very sick with the pregnancy,” she said. “So, I didn’t do a lot of campaign stops without him, although I would go with him.”

Iowa and the other early states, she said, are really her first experiences serving as a campaign spokesperson for her husband. Chris and Jackie are also one family out of two in the Democratic field who have the added dynamic of traveling with young children. Their two daughters, now 5 and 2, are often with one or the other at campaign stops.

“You know, I’m one of these people who turned to shopping online for groceries,” she said while her cheeks flushed from the confession. “I had the groceries delivered because the thought of taking two little girls to the grocery store is so overwhelming. It just seems like even simple tasks become much harder. All mothers and fathers who’ve done this know that when you are moving with children, it’s just not like moving alone. It just takes so much more energy. And, the truth is, that if Christina needs a potty break — she needs a potty break.”

Iowans and voters in the other early states, she said, have been understanding of the challenges of traveling with the girls.

“I think most people recognize that it is more difficult to have control of any situation when you have them with you,” she said. “We’ve had everything from wardrobe malfunctions to Christina taking off her clothes — you just can’t script a two-year-old. We have the youngest children on the campaign trail, on the Democratic side, and I think we have the only one in diapers. But the girls have been great sports about it and they’ve been doing all these great, unpredictable things that little ones do.”

During one of Chris’s campaign speeches in Boone, their oldest daughter, Grace, didn’t want to release her father so that he could go onto the stage. She clung to him until he reached the microphone and then went to sit with her mother. When their father announced the two girls by name, however, Christina jumped up, ran in front of her father and began Irish step dancing.

“She just cracked the place up and she was only doing what her two-year-old self wanted to do at that moment,” Jackie said and laughed at the memory. “We work to make sure that they are around us when they want to be around us. We also try to make sure they are swimming at the hotel when they want to be. It’s important for them to have a little control in their lives too.”

Since campaigning with two young children is such a challenge — and obviously something the couple would have taken into consideration before launching this campaign — why did they throw their hat into the ring?

For several years — even before Jackie and Chris began their relationship — it has been floated that Chris should consider a run for the White House.

“In April of last year, he asked me to get a babysitter so that we could take a walk,” she said. “That’s where he talked to me. We finished the walk and then went out to dinner and I told him that he had some very distinct ideas about where this country should be headed — that he was so disappointed about the nation’s current direction. I told him that if this was what he wanted to do that I’d be behind him all the way.

“My first thought was ‘Oh my goodness! I don’t want to be the little old lady on the porch next to him that told him not to run.’ A little further into the thought process I also realized that I have absolute confidence in his ability to bring people together. This country has been behaving like it is so divided, even though I know most Americans just want our moral authority to be restored. I realized that I have no doubts that he is actually the person who can do the job.”