Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., greets guests during a recent campaign stop in Rock Hill, S.C.

AP / Melissa Cherry

Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, who’s to be at a Providence fundraiser for his presidential campaign today, was on the phone.

And while he’s a long shot for the Democratic nomination, you can’t say he isn’t trying or doesn’t relish the quest.

Here’s something to think about:

If Sen. Hillary Clinton wins the race for the White House, she’d be the first woman president. Sen. Barack Obama would be the first black president. Gov. Bill Richardson, still another Democrat, would be the first Latino. And if Republican Mitt Romney wins, he’d be the first Mormon.

But if Dodd wins, what would he be?

Without hesitation, he replied, “I’d be the first president from Providence College!”

The 1966 alum was calling at my request. It was Thursday afternoon and, of course, he was on a cell phone. “I’m on the way to the airport here in Baltimore,” he said. “I’m going down to Birmingham.”

Perfect. Because one of the things I wanted to talk to Dodd about was the campaign whirl, which on Monday night brought him to Council Bluffs, Iowa, a state whose caucuses will provide an early 2008 test of the candidates’ strengths.

Dodd, 62, huddled with some 25 people at a meeting at Tish’s restaurant. The session was mentioned in The New York Times and covered by Council Bluffs’ Daily Nonpareil and the Omaha World-Herald. (Council Bluffs is across the Missouri River from Nebraska.)

You perhaps think a presidential campaign is full of glitter, Meet the Press, and crowds of thousands in big auditoriums. But for Dodd, on this night, it was a couple of dozen people in a function room in a restaurant so busy that Kathy Tisher, one of the owners, told me she didn’t get a chance to meet him. But she did say that the mayor’s wife attended. “She really had great things to say,” Tisher reported on Thursday. “She was pretty impressed that somebody from the presidential race came to our city … They were very impressed by Senator Dodd.”

(Former Sen. John Edwards also was about to drop into town.)

I wanted to know from Dodd what it felt like to spend his time this way.

“I actually enjoy this,” the senator said. “I’ve always been amazed at people in public life who don’t like people. I mean I don’t know what they do this for, other than I know they care about issues sometimes.”

And, he declared, “I had a wonderful evening. I think it was close to two hours of a question-and-answer period and you’re right, there were 25 people in the room. I point out they were 25 pretty influential people, by the way, in Council Bluffs.” He said the group included people who are active in caucus politics.

“It was a good evening. I was tired. I had been in Denver … I had arrived in Denver about 1 o’clock in the morning the night before, did two events in the morning, over lunch, flew to Omaha. I did an event in Omaha, and then I was in Council Bluffs. I finished up at about 11 and I was up at 4 in the morning to catch a flight to be back in Washington. So, you know, it’s tiring. I’d be foolish to say otherwise. It can be exhausting. But I find it interesting. I find people fair … I find it uplifting. I find it encouraging and stimulating that people are showing up.”

Though Tisher wasn’t complaining, she told me that the campaign used the meeting space but didn’t spring for a meal for the crowd. I needled Dodd: “What’s the matter with you?”

He chuckled and said, “We’ll be back!”

The Providence fundraiser, at 5 p.m., is at the East Side home of Martha Dodd Buonanno, the senator’s sister, and her husband, Bernard V. Buonanno Jr. Martha has been involved in volunteer activities, especially schools. Bernie is a lawyer, businessman, and political operative. As chairman of the Providence Civic Center Authority, he helped arrange the sale of its Dunkin’ Donuts Center to the state. The facility is now undergoing an ambitious renovation.

Martha and Chris were two of six children. Their late parents were Connecticut Sen. Thomas Dodd and the former Grace Murphy, who grew up in Westerly.

Martha says of her younger brother, “In our family, he just always was the magnetic person that drew people to him.”

Still, she and he both say their parents never deliberately set him on a path to Congress and, possibly, the presidency.

But Martha says the fact that their father had been in Nuremberg as a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals gave the household an international air. “I think we had more of an understanding of the world. We used to sit around the dinner table. We talked about Nuremberg and we talked about world issues growing up … I went to summer school in Mexico long before kids were really doing that.”

Other dinner-table topics included the threat of Communism. And the importance of civil rights. The father had tried cases for the Justice Department. “We were talking about social justice at an early age,” Martha says.

Chris, who lives in East Haddam, says the kids occasionally had to pose for campaign brochures but were never “dragged around to be props” on the campaign trail. Yes, he says, he resented it when his father took time away from the family to address a banquet of, say, the Rotary Club, the Knights of Columbus or the Chamber of Commerce. In the days before politicians got much TV coverage, “Those were major, huge events.”

Dodd says that it wasn’t until late in college and then his service with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic that he began to see himself on a political track.

In 1974, he graduated from the University of Louisville Law School. In 1974, he won a House seat, in 1980 the Senate seat.

In 1994, he came within one vote of becoming Senate Democratic leader. Then, while remaining a senator, he served a stint as Democratic national general chairman.

In a field that includes Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Sen. Joe Biden, and — who knows? — maybe even former Vice President Al Gore, Dodd faces extremely long odds for the presidential nomination.

He barely registers in the polls, even in Connecticut.

A Boston Globe story last week said that with at least 19 states possibly scheduling primaries on Feb. 5 — following contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina — candidates face the prospect of having to raise $100 million before the first vote is cast.

I asked Dodd if he can do that. “No,” he said.

But he also disagreed that he’d need to be at that level. He said the four early states constitute a “manageable” battleground. “Those four states give a candidate like me a chance to be heard,” he said.

Dodd said that in prior races early polls had Bill Clinton and John Kerry trailing badly. He added, “Anybody’s who talking poll numbers to me in February or March about a contest a year from today either knows nothing about national politics or has no memory. I sometimes feel like I’m in the middle of the contest of American Idol rather than for the presidency of the United States. But I don’t worry about it at this point. I’m not that well known, obviously, but I can get well known and I think I will.”

He said he believes he’ll raise enough money to be seen as credible.

On the central issue of the campaign so far — Iraq — I asked Dodd if he grasps how ridiculous the Democrats, especially in the Senate, look. They took control of Congress but the war gets worse. Senate Democrats have been unable even to pass a symbolic resolution to denounce President Bush’s troop “surge.”

Dodd said, “I wouldn’t use the word ‘ridiculous.”’ But he said he’s had “serious differences” with his colleagues. He called the “sense of the Senate resolution” inadequate. “We do sense-of-the-Senate resolutions on asparagus,” he said. “It’s hardly anything that requires any accountability, any teeth, or anything that’s real.”

He said he’d prefer that the Democrats fight for something tougher and get fewer votes than put up a meaningless resolution that, even with 56 votes, still fell short of the 60 required under parliamentary rules.

He said one way to proceed would be to cap troop levels. He’d also like to see troops immediately redeployed to safer areas, and more effort to bring stability through diplomacy and politics.

Why not shut off funds for the war? “That’s what we’ve got to do and that’s what it’s going to come to,” Dodd said.

(Thursday saw Democratic leaders in the Senate and House unveil a strategy to press for timetables to move troops out of Iraq by dates in 2008.)

In 2002, Dodd voted to authorize Bush to go to war. He says he has been saying for perhaps a year and a half that he was wrong to have voted that way. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton, who also voted for the 2002 authorization, refuses to concede she made a mistake.

Dodd told me there are two things people in public life never want to say. One is, “I made a mistake.” The other is, “I don’t know.”

He said when you make a mistake, you should admit it and move on. He continued, in reference to Clinton, “I don’t think it’s the most important question. I think it’s a legitimate question. And the most important question is what do we do from here?”

Incidentally, here’s a Dodd-Bush tie. In 1956, then-Congressman Tom Dodd, a PC alum himself, ran for Senate and lost to incumbent Republican Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current president.

And, evoking what has come to be another famous name, here’s something else from the crossroads of history:

In 1958, Tom Dodd was running — successfully, it turned out — for Connecticut’s other Senate slot. And Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro was running — unsuccessfully — for a Senate seat from Maryland.

As Martha Dodd’s parents drove her through Maryland to enroll at Trinity College, a school for Catholic women in Washington, she saw D’Alesandro campaign signs.

At Trinity, she promptly came upon D’Alesandro’s daughter, Nancy, and noticed her name tag. The two freshmen became good friends. They laugh about it now because, Martha says, they weren’t seeking fame, they just wanted to fade into the student crowd.

Today, the former Nancy D’Alesandro is California’s Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House.

I asked Martha about the prospect that she could find herself not only a pal of the House speaker but sister of the president.

“I do think about it and I really do believe that it is not out of the realm of possibility,” she said.

Senator Dodd insists to me he is “not at all” frustrated by being so far behind right now, and Martha says his tone is the same with her.

She reports, “When I talk to him, he says, ‘You know, this is just slow and steady and I’m enjoying the process and it’s the tortoise and the hare.’… He never has expressed frustration to me."

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal's political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com