Great American loser

Dennis Breen was a regular guy, fed up with the crookedness of political campaigns. So he ran one himself, after work and on weekends.

By T. Wright Townsend

Nov 10, 2000 | In a race in which the two major-party candidates spent a combined total of around $70 million, and in a time when money is increasingly essential to a candidate's success, a guy who bases his campaign around a pledge of accepting no money whatsoever isn't going to do very well.

"I knew from the beginning I wasn't going to win this thing," said lawyer and then-U.S. Senate candidate Dennis A. Breen a couple weeks before Election Day. The natural question, then: So why run?

The balloons at Breen's "victory party" Tuesday night at the Elks Lodge No. 1246 in Summit, N.J., were appropriately red, white and blue -- there just weren't very many of them. And most of the kids tearing around the room were doing their best to pop them with toothpicks stolen from the 6-foot-long subs. Family, friends and neighbors sat around card tables, cheese curls in aluminum casseroles between them, chatting as they watched CNN on a big-screen TV.

Breen, running as an independent for the Senate seat vacated by Frank Lautenberg, had rented out the Elks lodge in his hometown of Summit. (Summit is also the town where Jon Corzine, the Democratic candidate -- and winner of the seat -- lives, and where Bob Franks, the Republican candidate, grew up.) Breen brought $4,000 of his own money to the campaign, and with the last of it bought a keg of Coors Light, some bottles of generic orange soda, a few subs and a couple of bags of balloons.

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I first heard about his candidacy last spring when a friend told me about Breen's unique campaign pledge. "He won't take money from anyone," my friend said. "That's his thing."

I called Breen up and met him for a drink. He's a short guy, 49 years old, with gray hair and the easy confidence of a successful lawyer accustomed to talking to people about their problems. Breen likes to talk, and in that first conversation it became apparent that he was good at it.

He spoke to me with the coarse, matter-of-factness of a New York lawyer. Breen swears. He calls you by your name, and then a nickname he's decided upon within minutes of meeting you. He eschews political correctness -- he says "black," not "African-American" -- but doesn't offend, either. And best of all, none of this is for effect.

Raised in Brooklyn, Breen attended the State University of New York in Brockport, got a postgraduate degree in teaching from SUNY-Binghamton and another in law from the University of Dayton. Most recently he was a litigator for the law firm of Barry, McTiernan & Moore, though during the campaign he became the in-house counsel for an insurance agency. Breen was no political junkie growing up -- under his jovial energy and idealism is a seething dislike for how career politicians work. Like so many Americans, he hates everything about big-money politics.

It was the 1996 Senate race between Rep. Robert Toricelli, D-N.J., and Rep. Dick Zimmer, R-N.J., that really made him steam. "It was such a nasty campaign, so negative," says Breen. "At the time I thought, 'This is just disgusting. We gotta bring this up a notch.'"

The real epiphany came during President Clinton's impeachment -- Breen was in the shower. "I was so ticked off that some senators would announce their vote before they'd even heard the evidence against the president," he says. "As a litigator, I was offended, and I thought, 'Even 10 independent voices could force this to a debate and an honest decision.' That's when I decided to do this."

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