Former Utah Sen. Bob Bennett keeps busy, talks about why he didn't mount write-in campaign

Former Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is staying busy a month after leaving Congress, according to a story in today's USA Today.

Bennett is a senior policy adviser at Arent Fox, a lobbying firm. As first reported by the Deseret News in December, Bennett has also launched a new consulting company and is teaching at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah.

USA Today reported that Bennett is also at work on a book. The story points out that senators must wait two years after they leave the senate chambers before they can lobby Congress. Bennett and others aren't directly lobbying Congress, but their companies do.

Bennett also appeared last week on CBS News to talk with fellow Arent Fox senior policy adviser, Byron Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota.

CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford asked Bennett about the tea party in light of his loss to Mike Lee in the Utah Republican convention last year. Bennett said his inability to win a fourth term was not an indication of wide-ranging tea party sentiment in the Utah electorate because he lost at convention in a vote of a select number of party delegates.

"The voters never got an opportunity to vote for me, and the polls all indicated if I could have gotten into a primary and certainly into a general election, I would have won. If I had been Lisa Murkowski's age, I think I would have done what she did and mount a write-in campaign and I think I would have won the way she did. But I have only one term left in my at my age, and I looked at it and said, to tear the state apart, to tear the party apart just so that I can gratify my ego and say I get one more term in the Senate, no.

"And Mike Lee in my view is not as, what's the word to be polite, let's just say he's not like Joe Miller. I think Mike Lee I think has the potential to be a first-class senator."

e-mail: twalch@desnews.com