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WASHINGTON – As recently as the fall of 2008 Dan Coats planned to retire to North Carolina, according to a video of a talk he gave to Tar Heels at the GOP convention. Coats is taking preliminary steps to run against incumbent Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.
But Coats said Friday afternoon that he's put aside his plans to retire and will sell that house.
"We do have a second home in North Carolina," he said in an e-mail, "and had plans to spend more time there after retiring. Obviously, I now have no plans to retire, so it's likely we will be selling our North Carolina second home."
The video is being circulated by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which began playing hardball politics within hours of news leaks that Coats is thinking about running for Senate in Indiana.
The Democratic committee distributed documents that show Coats and his wife, Marsha, bought a $1.8 million house in Wilmington, N.C., in 2006.
He said they bought the home to be hear his wife's aging parents, who are in a North Carolina retirement home nearby.
Coats, a Washington lobbyist, represented Indiana in Congress for 18 years – first as a House member from northeast Indiana and then in the Senate. He left office at the end of his term in 1998 and became a lobbyist, except for four years as former President Bush's ambassador to Germany.
Dan and Marsha Coats bought a house in Virginia after he was sworn into Congress in 1981. Many members of Congress buy homes and move their families to the Washington area. Coats kept an apartment in Fort Wayne for many years while he was in Congress. Seven years ago, he bought a home in another Washington suburb.
In the video, Coats is seen addressing a group of North Carolina delegates to the Republican convention.
"If you don't tell the good people of Indiana," he says, smiling, "Marsha and I decided there might be a better place where some of these older bones can absorb, so we have joined her parents in North Carolina and have a home down there which we use as a second home, but hope will be our first home and then I'll be able to register and vote for your two senators and congressmen and be a North Carolinian."
Deirdre Murphy, the Democratic committee's national press secretary, said it was telling that Coats planned to retire in North Carolina, not Indiana.
"Dan Coats is floating that he wants to represent Hoosiers," she said. "Yet he left Indiana to become a lobbyist, and we now find footage of him saying he wants to live in North Carolina. Whose values does he represent?"
The video news release shows the brief footage of Coats at a podium speaking to the Tar Heel delegates, and an announcer says: "When he left Indiana to be a Washington lobbyist, he left Hoosier values behind."
sylviasmith@jg.net
