Ian Settas
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His Excellency Senator Ian Settas | |
|---|---|
| File:Ian Settas new pic.jpg Senator Ian Settas giving a foreign policy speech in July 2013. | |
| Senate Majority Leader | |
| Assumed office January 6th, 2012 | |
| Preceded by | TBA |
| Imperial Senator from Provisa | |
| Assumed office January 1st, 2005 | |
| Preceded by | Jonathon Hoffman |
| Personal details | |
| Born | July 9th, 1978 Provisa, Provisa |
| Nationality | Belhavian |
| Political party | Conservative Party |
| Spouse | Rebecca T. Settas |
| Residence | Provisa |
| Alma mater | B.A., Political Science, Imperial Provisa University J.D., Imperial Provisa University School of Law |
| Profession | Politician, Lawyer |
Ian E. Settas, J.D. (born July 9th, 1978) is the current Senate Majority Leader of the Imperial Senate of Belhavia and junior Senator from Provisa. He is a member of the Conservative Party. He is a graduate of the private liberal arts Imperial Provisa University and its prestigious law school, Imperial Provisa University School of Law.
Settas practiced less than a year of corporate law before running for office. With Liberal Democrat Senator Jonathon Hoffman's retirement in 2004, Settas jumped into the race as the frontrunner.
His father, former President Julian Settas rallied the political troops - calling in favors, securing contributions from longtime donors, holding events to galvanize the grassroots. He won the 2004 Imperial Senate election in Provisa decisively, beating popular former Lib Dem Provisa mayor Robert Hofskin with 55% of the vote.
With scandal-ridden Senator TBA's resignation as Senate Majority Leader in early January 2012, Ian Settas was unanimously elected as his replacement.
Since being elected, Settas has been touted by many as a strong Conservative presidential candidate in the 2016 presidential election because of his father's successful political legacy. He declared his 2016 bid in early 2015, but withdrew in late 2015 after a subpar debate performance, tepid fundraising, and rising questions of his primary-election viability. In December 2015, he endorsed sitting Vice-President and former 2016 rival Jacob Grossman.
Early life and education
He was born in mid-July 1978 to Julian and Adrianna Settas, a high-profile Imperial Senator from Provisa and failed 1976 presidential candidate and socialite and an heiress to the Asimov family agribusiness fortune, respectively. Settas grew up in the public spotlight, spending his childhood in the Presidential Palace as his father served as President of Belhavia in the 1980s.
He grew up in "the proverbial lap of luxury," family and friends recount, in the family estate in Kings Hill. He attended a string of private independent Conservadox movement-affiliated Jewish day schools in and around the greater Provisa metropolitan area.
He was a good student who typically scored in the top 5% of his class, and a model athlete and footballer. The family often "summered" in Avalon, Freeport, where he mingled with other elite families such as the Roths, Goldmans, Kalians, Goldwaters and others.
He and some other teenaged friends were picked up by Avalon police for allegedly defacing the outer walls of properties of other elite families publicly known to be opposed to them, but the police concluded there was no evidence and the boys, including Settas, were released, much to public outcry about "elite privilege" and "double standards."
He attended Imperial Provisa University for undergraduate studies in political science and later at Imperial Provisa University School of Law for his J.D.
Legal career
He interviewed and obtained a job at Weinstein Gold Halevi, the most prestigious law firm in the country where he practiced corporate law. He worked there less than 10 months before resigning to run for the Imperial Senate in early January 2004.
2004 Senate campaign
When incumbent Liberal Democratic Senator Jonathon Hoffman shocked the political world by declining re-election on December 26th, 2003, Settas immediately considered contesting the seat. Hoffman's Senate seat was the same one his father had occupied in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the family considered it the "Settas seat" stolen by the Lib Dems in the 1990s. His father and close friends encouraged his interest, and several old supporters of the elder Settas commissioned private polls testing the junior Settas' political viability with the electorate and leaked his interest as trial balloons to gauge interest from the local Tory Provisa establishment and donor base. When word got out that Ian Settas was seriously eying a run for the seat, all other interested credible Tory candidates immediately sat on their hands out of respect to his father's stature in the party, and the internal polls came back showing Settas holding up well against likely Liberal Democratic opponents.
After several days of consideration and talks with his family, friends, and his father's old network of senior party officials and allies, the junior Settas launched his campaign on January 4th, 2004. He immediately cleared the Conservative Party Senate primary as all other candidates then announced that they were not running one after another for several days. Settas then utilized his father's donor and activist network to full effect, scheduling several high-shekel fundraisers for the rest of January and February as he hired top-notch campaign staff.
The Liberal Democrats, already concerned because 2004 favored the Tories as the out-party with incumbent Lib Dem President Garret Holleran's term-limited and mildly unpopular tenure was coming to a close, had few credible candidates willing to take on the young and ambitious scion of the most popular Tory president in modern history. The Liberal Democrats settled on former two-term Provisa mayor Robert Hofskin, who served his tenure throughout most of the 1990s and early 2000s. Hofskin was an adept and capable politician, whose 1998 re-election was a relatively landslide with 59% in a three-way race inside the usually closely-fought swing province that regularly swung back and forth between the parties. Hofskin's announcement on January 28th, 2004, of his entry in the race likewise cleared his party's primary, and Settas and Hofskin initiated the race as a de facto general election campaign from the beginning.
Because of the novelty and high national interest in the race by the media and public, media outlets and outside groups commissioned a deluge of public polls reminiscent of a presidential race than even a high-profile Imperial Senate campaign. In January and February, Hofskin led Settas by about 10-12%, averaging 50-55% to Settas' 38%-42%. While Settas had higher name recognition as the son of a former President, he was virtually unknown as a person without a political or public record, while Hofskin had an established political record and was well-known by Provisa voters for his 1994 and 1998 elections and popular mayoralty over the city-province.
In February, Settas kicked off an 8-week, 15-neighborhood whistletop tour where he gave stump speeches at community events, shook hands at popular local restaurants and icons, and released policy papers outlining his views on Imperial politics in the Senate. Hofskin did his own whirlwind set of rallies, looking to activate base Lib Dem voters and activists and wooing swing voters.
By late February, Settas had cut Hofskin's lead in half, pulling into the mid-40s while Hofskin hovered around 50% in the polls. In March, both candidates breezed past their uncontested primary elections. By the March filing, Settas had raised an impressive fundraising total of over $3.5 million in less than two months, aided by his father's extensive political network. Hofskin raised $1.2 million in the same period, lagging significantly as many major party donors thought Settas was unbeatable. However, Hofskin was aided by over $800,000 shekels' worth of outside anti-Settas spending by liberal interest groups and the Liberal Democratic Senate Committee, the party's main organization to elect Lib Dems to the Imperial Senate.
By April and May, outside liberal interest groups polled Settas and found him vulnerable on lacking a public record, and they dumped several hundred thousand shekels' worth of cable and broadcast TV ads hitting him on being too young, overly ambitious, "just another elite", and a puppet of his father. Settas' campaign replied by tying the third-party attacks to Hofskin, who had pledged to run a clean campaign. The Tory campaign asserted that Hofskin supported and agreed with the character attacks, charging him a hypocrite who was "bankrupt on failed and discredited liberal policies."
By early June and July, Settas and Hofskin were tied in the polls, within each other's margin of error. With both parties' base voters coalescing around their party's nominees, independents and Libertarians became the swing blocs, and both sides courted and wooed groups and neighborhoods with large numbers of these voters. Each also tried to poach certain consistencies from the other's camp: Settas went after ethnic Rodarian voters of both Jewish and Catholic faith and culture as well as ethnic Oriental Anikatians, both of which leaned towards the Liberal Democrats normally, while Hofskin went after populist-leaning ethnic Eaglelanders and small-business owners, both of which were Tory-voting constituencies.
Hofskin took a narrow lead for most of August, leading Settas by 5-7 points during a mini-scandal that erupted after several senior former staffers of the elder Settas political network were caught on audio by a journalist plotting to release embarrassing details from Hofskin's messy divorce in the early 1990s. Although the junior Settas was quick to distance himself from, and strongly condemned, the proposed acts in the face of public outcry, he nonetheless took a hit in his poll standings.
By early September, the mini-scandal was past history and with ten million shekels' worth of new TV, radio, and print ads inundating Provisa, supporting by a massive mobilization of the Tory get-out-the-vote effort, Settas caught up to, and quickly overtook, Hofskin in the polls. After September 25th, 2004, only three polls out of 18 before Election Day had Hofskin ahead narrowly or tied; the others all showed a growing Settas lead. By late October, the bulge in the polling sometimes showing a 12- or 14-point Settas lead closed somewhat as Lib Dem voters came home to Hofskin's camp, but the Tory scion still averaged a 7% lead on the eve of Election Day. On November 2nd, 2004, the results trickled in, with strong performance by Settas across the city, even in strong Lib Dem districts, reported by exit polls, and confirmed by the ballot count. Later that night at 10:55pm, Hofskin called Settas and conceded. The final tally showed Settas decisively beating Hofskin by a nearly 10-point margin, 54.7% to 44.3%.
Imperial Senator
2005 - 2012
Although normally new Senators "pay their dues" by keeping a "low profile", learning the parliamentary and archaic procedures of the Senate chamber, and seek patronage from more senior and tenured Senators in party leadership and on powerful committees, because of his media-obsessed political celebrity and political lineage (and the fact that over two-thirds of the sitting Tory senators were either elected under his father's presidency in the 1980s or served with him as Senate peers in the 1970s), Ian Settas entered the chamber to pomp and ceremony. He was immediately offered a place in the Tory Senate caucus leadership as an assistant whip, and he was offered several plum seats on the most powerful and influential committees, such as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Taxation and Revenues Committee, the Senate Budget Committee, and the Senate Spending Appropriations Committee, all of which he accepted.
Relationship with President Arnoth (2005 - 2009)
However much of a hero's welcome he received from his Senate colleagues and the Provisa political establishment, he soon found himself deeply at odds with newly elected centrist Tory President Jeff Arnoth. While Settas considered himself to be a conservative reformer and defense hawk, Arnoth embraced an image as a cautious moderate political gradualist and dovish diplomat who preferred multilateral diplomacy over unilateral action.
The two clashed over defense and military spending, Belhavian policy towards Rodarion and its human rights record, trade, and Arnoth's policy of distance and moderate disengagement from the CDI throughout the latter's four-year presidency.
The conflict was particularly fraught over the issue of Rodarion and its human rights record; Settas was generally pro-warmer relations with the Papal Republic, a position he inherited from his father. Arnoth, a self-described humanitarian and "idealistic" diplomat, confronted Rodarion on the international stage for its violations of representative due process and rising authoritarianism. Several times throughout his presidency, Arnold and other anti-Rodarion elements outmaneuvered Settas and other pro-Rodarion forces on the Senate floor, successfully passing resolutions, new policies, and policy riders that chilled Rodar-Belhavian relations in the mid-2000s.
Settas found Arnoth's constant bipartisan overtures with the badly weakened opposition Liberal Democrats a betrayal of the party and a squandering of the Tories' then-strong Senate majorities, which fell short but approached the party's heyday under his father's Senate majorities in the mid-1980s.
Between 2005 and 2008, he worked closely with the Independent Centrist Caucus, a group of four breakaway conservative Liberal Democratic senators who left the Liberal Democratic Senate party caucus and became nominal independents, especially with its leader, then-Senator Joe Manton. Sometimes allying with President Arnoth, and other times leading the charge for the Tory leadership in the Senate, the ICC aided Settas' efforts in 2005 and 2006, providing the Conservatives with the 42 votes (60% of the chamber) needed to defeat filibusters and pass a conservative reform agenda of slashing the National Retail Sales Tax's flat rate from 32.4% to 26%, gutting fracking regulations in the Far South, abolishing the 2.5% inheritance tax created in the 1993 Budget Compromise, and lowering tariffs on Ulthrannic imports.
Relationship with President Goldman (2009 - 2012)
Senate Majority Leader (2012 - present)
Relationship with President Goldman (2012 - 2017)
2008, 2012, and 2016 campaigns
2008
2012
2016
Electoral history
| Election | Lib Dems | Tories | Libertarians | Independents | Winner | Margin of victory | Loser(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 41.5% | 53.3% | 4.6% | 0.6% | Conservative Ian Settas (inc.) | 11.8% | Liberal Democrat TBD, And others |
| 2008 | 48.8% | 51.1%1 | N/A | <0.1% | Conservative Ian Settas (inc.) | 2.3% | Liberal Democrat TBD, And others |
| 2004 | 44.2% | 54.7%1 | N/A | 1.1% | Conservative Ian Settas | 10.5% | Liberal Democrat Robert Hofskin, And others |
Notes:
1. Cross-endorsed by both the Conservative and Libertarian parties.
2016 Presidential campaign
Announcement
Themes and narratives
Primary
Campaign
Endorsements
Debates
Fundraising totals
Withdrawal from race
Political views
Cultural and political image
Settas is viewed by the public at large as a likeable and ambitious political scion who embodies "the 21st century generation" despite technically being at the far end of Generation X. He is noted as an athlete and sports fan, supporting his home-town football team the Provisa Imperials at many games during the season when he's not in the Senate.
He and his wife, Rebecca, being high-profile social elites, are often lavished attention by the media and paparazzi attending charity galas, political dinners, sports and cultural events, and other outings.
The Aisling tabloid Fate has been caught harassing the couple and their children several times between 2001 and 2008. In 2008, Settas sued the tabloid in Aisling court and won a large undisclosed settlement.
Politically, his reputation is measured and influential, being the third-most powerful elected official in the Empire. He is viewed by many as the epitome of the Jewish establishment elite, and has received criticism from various sectors of society for his pro-corporate, anti-populist views and patrician, political "royalty" pedigree.
Family and personal life
Settas is married to Rebecca (née Sloane) since 2002, being married for 14 years as of 2016. They have two children, by age: Sadie (10) and Lianna (7).
He and his wife are religiously observant Conservadox Jews and attend shul at Kesher Israel in Provisa's Kings Hill neighborhood. He has faced weary hostility from Charedi Jews for not being "fully Torah observant enough," but after several years in the Senate, he has good relationships with leading Orthodox Jewish interest and religious groups.
Personality and temperament
As the only child of a popular politician and former President, Settas grew up in the public spotlight since his childhood. He was age 3 when his father became president, and just 11 when his father ended his term. After that, his family enjoyed intense and perpetual media and social attention in his father's post-presidency. Due to this, several friends such as Jacen Gray have theorized that Settas is an overly private person, becoming testy and cold with reporters who attempt to dig into his and his family's personal lives.
As an only child and the son of one of the most powerful Belhavian leaders in the contemporary era, many family friends and teachers noted that Settas' ambitious, perfectionist, ultra-competitive nature was enhanced by the perennial limelight shown on him, as well as the mountain of high expectations he and everyone around him expected of him. Consequently, politics has become a "contact sport" for him, and political rivals have independently commented at various times the hard-edged, thin-skinned, and merciless nature of his that he employed against any opposition to his will.
This has bled into what many have called arrogance or self-centeredness, with 2004 Liberal Democratic Senate opponent Robert Hofskin calling him "arrogant, full of himself, and capricious to anyone not on his side." An anonymous Conservative Imperial Senator remarked to the press in 2009 that "[he] can't suffer defeat...nor criticism. He's a bit of a narcissist."
However, Settas and those around him have denounced such perceptions, with his father Julian commenting in a media interview in 2011 that "my son's personality is driven, its intense, its perfectionistic - but it's not mean, it's not ruthless...Ian is very mature, very driven to be sure. But he's ultimately a very considerate, passionate, conscientious...and caring person."