DENVER—A whip-smart lawyer who has turned successively to the worlds of business and education, Denver Superintendent Michael Bennet won’t have much trouble, colleagues say, adjusting to the biggest promotion of his life: to U.S senator.
Colleagues say the 44-year-old Yale-educated lawyer is a quick study who won’t need long to navigate Congress, even though Bennet’s never held public office before. Bennet was tapped Saturday by Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter to fill the remaining two years of the Senate term of Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar, who is awaiting confirmation as interior secretary for President-elect Barack Obama.
The Bennet choice, when more seasoned Democratic politicians including two members of the U.S. House expressed interest in the job, shocked political observers across Colorado. The Rocky Mountain Newspaper on Saturday announced the selection with a banner headline calling him “Senator Surprise,” and bloggers both left and right were puzzling over the Bennet pick.
But people who have worked with Bennet, who will become the Senate’s youngest member pending Salazar’s confirmation to the Cabinet, say they’re not surprised.
“He picks things up quickly. He connects things quickly. He’ll be good,” said Paul Teske, dean of public policy at the University of Colorado-Denver.
Educators were joking that the halls of the U.S. Senate should be a breeze for Bennet after walking into the struggling 73,000-student Denver school system in 2005 with no education degree and managing to court teachers to a business-style turnaround plan.
Bennet wooed teachers to a merit play plan they’d opposed for years and closed struggling schools where students of color were performing the worst. Bennet’s turnaround plan at first was met with skepticism—even a city association of church ministers opposed him publicly—but Bennet persuaded Denver to go along with his reform plan. Now, test scores are up and Denver teachers have a pay-for-performance plan called ProComp.
“He took over I would say a district that was really foundering, that just had kind of a poor spirit. Kids were really struggling. And he was just a breath of fresh air,” recalled Nelson Van Vranken, assistant principal at Greenwood K-8 School in northeast Denver.
It wasn’t the first time Bennet waded into an arena and succeeded even without extensive background in the area. Bennet’s varied resume includes stints writing speeches for former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno as an aide to a deputy attorney general; a corporate turnaround specialist who, while working for Colorado billionaire investor Philip Anschutz, orchestrated the reorganization of three movie theater chains into the world’s largest movie-theater company, Regal Entertainment Group ; and an aide to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.
Bennet was editor of the Yale Law Review and received an undergraduate degree in history from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where his father was university president.
Douglas Bennet also was an aide to the U.S. ambassador to India in the early 1960s, and Bennet was born in New Delhi in 1964. Michael Bennet grew up in Washington and attended the St. Albans prep school. His brother, James Bennet, is editor of The Atlantic magazine and a former Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.
Bennet was talked about as a possible education secretary choice for Obama, though he wasn’t chosen. But it was just a matter of time, colleagues say, before Bennet’s political career took off.
“He’s always had his eye cast to the next opportunity,” said Alan Gottlieb, editor of Education News Colorado, a Web site run by the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition.
“I don’t think he’ll have any trouble adjusting to the world of politics,” Gottlieb said. “He just seems born to it.”
