To sum up the U.S. Senate race in Utah this fall, we have Republican Bob Bennett, the incumbent candidate, being challenged by Democrat Paul Van Dam, the recumbent candidate.
That's not to say Van Dam is lying down on the job of trying to take away Bennett's job — quite the opposite, in fact. The recumbent label simply refers to the mode of transportation oft-used by the former state attorney general.
Throughout his campaign, Van Dam, 66, and his wife, Mary Dawn Bailey, are taking a Tour de Utah on a tandem recumbent bike. They once cranked through Vietnam on a similar trek — minus campaigning for U.S. Senate, of course. Though not quite ready to take on Lance Armstrong, Van Dam, also a former Salt Lake County attorney, has logged more than 900 miles around the Beehive State the past year pedaling for votes — for a chance to meet and greet Utahns from St. George to the Cache Valley, for the opportunity to spread his ideas about the country's future and for killer calf muscles.
The road has been dangerous at times — and not just because he's a vocal Democrat tooling through Republican country. The Senate hopeful and his partner in climb were cruising down from Brian Head Ski Resort after an 11,000-foot-high lunch in late May, when their brakes went out. Next thing they knew, they were dangerously zipping down Parowan Canyon — with a 13 percent grade — at speeds reaching 60 mph.
Van Dam weaved through hairpin curves, just missed smacking a retaining wall and steered through the wrong lane to avoid venturing off the side of the road. An experienced motocross racer, the athletic and sharp-witted Van Dam managed to guide the fleeting bike through the downhill course, at times planting his foot to handle S curves. His communications director, who was following in the campaign van, lost sight of them and occasionally looked off the side of the road, fearing his boss had soared off an embankment. He was relieved to see them at the bottom — safe, sound and startled.
"I really thought we were going to get killed," Van Dam said. He added that in all his wild adventures on motorcycles, bikes, sailboats, river rafts and horses that this "was the worst feeling I've had about my impending doom."
It's not the first time Van Dam has tempted fate. In August of 1990, he was sailing with a friend on the Great Salt Lake when a windy thunderstorm hit. Their 22-foot sailboat was smacked by a squall and capsized. They bobbed on top of the vessel in 4-foot-high waves overnight before finally being rescued at about 4 a.m. To stay warm, they ripped apart a floating sail bag and wrapped themselves up in it.
The stranded sailors watched for hours in the middle of the night as rescuers searched for them, but their radio had sunk so they had no way of alerting them.
"It was absolutely the most helpless feeling and the longest night I have ever spent," Van Dam said at the time. They both suffered hypothermia and were exhausted but otherwise fine. "Shivering away for six or seven hours takes it out of you."
Van Dam has sailed again, worldwide even. That experience pushed him to learn the sport "in earnest," he said. He has since sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, and last year, he decided to pursue political office again — "once every decade," he jokes — while cruising around the Caribbean on his new 38-foot Catamaran.
Though not life-threatening per se, Van Dam faces an ominous political situation as he attempts to dethrone Bennett, who leads by a lopsided margin in the polls and in the pocketbook. The latest Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll by Dan Jones & Associates showed Bennett leading Van Dam by 37 percentage points. The last check of campaign finances revealed Bennett had about $2 million to campaign with compared to $100,000 for his challenger.
But if hitting the campaign trail harder counts for anything, then Van Dam appears to be leading in that category. Since announcing his candidacy last year, Van Dam has been a grassroots guru. When not pedaling, he has talked to "thousands of people" on the street, in restaurants, in schools, at "every senior citizen center in every small town . . . (and) every service club that'll hear us." He says he's waging it like "guerrilla warfare" and calls it a "door-to-door, person-to-person campaign."
"We're working as hard as we know how," Van Dam said, "given the substantial disabilities that exist in Utah for a Democrat, which equals the wrong party, the wrong religion and only about a million eight hundred thousand dollars disability in financing."
Van Dam, a product of the University of Utah law school (J.D., 1966), has played the role of underdog before — and he beat overdogs who led pre-election polls but were shocked on election night.
"When I ran for county attorney in 1974, the first thing my campaign manager said is, 'You haven't got a snowball's chance in hell,' " he recalls. Van Dam was first pitted against John Avery, who he says was "Mr. Democrat in Salt Lake County. He told me himself he could crush me like a bug because he had all the party's support." Van Dam earned 69 1/2 percent of the vote at the county convention, and he won the primary. "So," he said, "I didn't crush very easily."
The unexpected surge continued. "Then I had David Young, who was the great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, he kept telling me and everybody who would listen," Van Dam said. "I got tired of it and I said, 'Listen, my grandma's a direct descendant of Joseph Smith, and I think my Joseph Smith trumps your Brigham Young.' So, we didn't have that discussion anymore."
He also won that race — meaning, Bennett might not want to mention that he and his wife are grandchildren of LDS Church presidents Heber J. Grant (Bennett) and David O. McKay (his wife).
Van Dam also trailed by 36 points to two-term Republican incumbent David Wilkinson prior to the state attorney general's race. Plus, he was a Democrat, and a Democrat not named Matheson hadn't beaten a Republican in a statewide election in two decades.
"I didn't have a chance," he said.
He won anyway.
Van Dam also has a slew of court victories from his days as a prosecutor and a high-profile private attorney. His resume includes the first conviction of serial killer Ted Bundy — later, a phone call from Bundy to Van Dam led to a virtual admission of guilt as he guided authorities to the location of one of his Utah victims — and the prosecution of Ervil LeBaron.
Van Dam has deep roots in Utah, dating back to the 1860s when his ancestors settled in Salt Lake City from England and the Netherlands. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Van Dam, whose father was an iron worker, graduated from East High School in 1955. His wife and then-classmate (their relationship sparked at a 45-year class reunion) recalls him bringing down the house with a legendary stage performance of "Good Ole Mountain Dew." He's played guitar and sung in some sort of band since then and even flirted with a music career. He also used to enjoy hunting and working on cars.
Van Dam supported himself during school working as a ranch hand on an Idaho farm, in restaurants, as a delivery driver, as an orderly at LDS Hospital and various other odd jobs. His least favorite employment was being a woman's shoe salesman.
Van Dam had two children with his first wife and gained three more when remarrying last year. He now has eight grandchildren, who can brag about their grandparents winning 12 gold and silver medals between them in biking competitions at the Huntsman Senior Games in St. George in 2002 and '03.
In between and around attorney jobs, Van Dam has spent plenty of time playing squash, poring through literature of all types (from murder mysteries to the intricacies of the body's metabolism), playing guitar in his country Western band and traveling the world (from China to South America to Holland, where he lived a few months in the late '90s after a divorce to brush up on the Dutch he learned on an LDS mission).
Van Dam acknowledges this might be his biggest challenge so far, though. But he isn't running to be a sacrificial lamb for the party. He believes things have gone haywire in the political system — partly because of politicians like Bennett — and he's determined to try to help fix them.
Van Dam, who didn't seek a second term after either of his elections, made his decision to re-enter the political realm in 2003 while on a six-month-long voyage in the Caribbean. He witnessed unsettling anti-American rallies filled with rancor. Once he returned and began researching and discovering why that vitriol existed against the United States (he blames George W. Bush), he said he "got bitten by the bug again."
E-mail: jody@desnews.com