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Colo. gov names schools chief for Senate vacancy
By KRISTEN WYATT,Associated Press Writer AP - 1 hour 33 minutes ago
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 adjusting to the biggest promotion of his life: to U.S. senator.
That's what colleagues are saying about the Yale-educated lawyer, a quick study who won't need long to navigate Congress, even though Bennet has never held public office. Bennet was named Saturday by Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter as his choice 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."
But people who have worked with Bennet, a Democrat, who at 44 will become the Senate's youngest member pending Salazar's confirmation to the Cabinet, say he's up for the challenge.
Educators joked 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.
Bennet wooed teachers to a pay-for-performance plan called ProComp they had opposed for years and closed struggling schools where minority students were performing the worst.
"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.
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 helped Colorado billionaire investor Philip Anschutz to reorganize 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.
His father Douglas Bennet also was an aide to the U.S. ambassador to India in the early 1960s, and Michael Bennet was born in New Delhi in 1964. He 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's name was floated as a possible education secretary choice for Obama, though he wasn't chosen. Colleagues say it was just a matter of time before Bennet's political career took off.
"I don't think he'll have any trouble adjusting to the world of politics," said Alan Gottlieb, editor of Education News Colorado, a Web site run by the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition. "He just seems born to it."
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