MANCHESTER, N.H. – A few minutes before 6 p.m. on Friday evening, Senator Dodd of Connecticut is going booth-to-booth, greeting voters in the jam-packed Puritan Backroom restaurant. They are retirees, parents with small children, regular people for whom a jocular, white-haired senator with a portfolio of policy achievements is a comforting presence. Some saw Mr. Dodd chide Senator Obama of Illinois for suggesting America attack Pakistan at the AFL-CIO debate in Chicago earlier in the week. And they liked it.

“We watched the debate, and we liked the answers he gave,” James Philbrook of Milford said. His wife, Doris Philbrook, added that her eye was on “people with experience.”

So far, Mr. Dodd’s 26 years in the Senate, where he sponsored such legislation as the Family and Medical Leave Act, haven’t amounted to much in the polls. A July University of New Hampshire poll put Mr. Dodd near the bottom of what has been dubbed the “second tier” of Democratic candidates, with Senator Clinton and Mr. Obama composing the “first tier.”

Mr. Dodd, in an interview with The New York Sun, said the big dynamic in the race was why so many voters still haven’t made up their minds. His campaign’s voter identification telephone calls found that 78% of New Hampshire voters and 82% of Iowa voters were still undecided.

“It’s a legitimate question to ask me,” he says, when asked why a candidate of his experience and talent isn’t polling higher, then alludes to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama. “It’s more of a legitimate question to say after you virtually have incumbency status by reputation and name or you’ve been on the cover of every magazine and nothing’s ever been said highly critical of you, why aren’t you doing better? Why are people undecided about you at this point?”

He dismissed the notion of tiering candidates. “TV networks want to sell soap and maintain Nielsen ratings,” he said. “What amazes me in a way is that people who follow all this buy into this notion,” Mr. Dodd said. “The door is very open.”

While Mr. Dodd’s more than quarter-century in the Senate contrasts with Mr. Obama’s less-than-three, he has in recent days been critical of Senator Clinton, who has been running a campaign predicated on “experience.” In speaking to the Sun, he initiated a direct critique of what is one of the foundations of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, her role in formulating health care reform in the early 1990s. “So when people say I’m ready to lead, fine, so tell me how you have. And I cite, you know, I know my colleague from New York says this all the time, and I say this respectfully, that she ‘bears the scars’ from what happened on the health care thing,” Mr. Dodd said. “Political scars are one thing. But the scars from mismanaging an issue that people have had to pay [for] because they haven’t had any health insurance or coverage for the past 15 years is a lot more serious in many ways. So when you’re talking about how that happened, it happened because it was mismanaged.”

Mr. Dodd’s comment leveling blame at Mrs. Clinton on the failure of health care reform 13 years ago is out of step with much of the current Democratic thinking on the demise of such efforts, which holds that Republicans and health care companies targeted it and killed it with television ads. That is no excuse, said Mr. Dodd. “Republicans ganged up on me on Family Medical Leave. It took me seven years, and I got Kit Bond and Dan Coats and Al D’Amato, and others to join me, so you work at those things. You can’t go out ‘my way or the highway’… Yeah, you get beaten up on things, but to put things together, make them happen, it takes work. It isn’t enough to say it just didn’t work because the other side opposed you. Of course, they’re going to oppose you, everything. That’s not an answer. If that’s your answer, then nothing will ever work.”

Mr. Dodd further took issue with the experience of Mr. Obama, whom he called “very talented.”

“When you’re reading off a teleprompter at a speech, in front of a distinguished audience, and you pose a hypothetical problem and propose a hypothetical solution to it, which suggests the unilateral action into another country that is a nuclear power, the alternative of which is a jihadist, fundamentalist state with nuclear weapons, that’s irresponsible,” Mr. Dodd said. “Who’s advising him, first of all? But you ought to have enough sense, beyond a briefing book knowledge of this thing, you don’t say those kind of things.”

As far as Mr. Obama’s willingness to meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. during his first year in office, Mr. Dodd said each had to be taken on a case-by-case basis. “Three of them I’ve already met,” he said referring to Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Hafez al-Assad. “I’d never meet with Ahmadinejad, he’s a thug.”

Since January, Mr. Dodd has been the chairman of the Senate banking committee, on which he has sat for 26 years. Noting that he had spoken to the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, earlier in the day, Mr. Dodd urged the government to promote more liquidity in the financial markets. “I’ve made strong recommendations the last two days that these people ought to get more liquidity into the marketplace. It’s seized up,” Mr. Dodd said. “For the first time since 9/11 they’ve got the Fed to pump a little liquidity in.”

One factor that is frequently overlooked in Mr. Dodd’s life story is his father, who served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and as a senator. Mr. Dodd will publish a book in the coming months recounting his father’s letters home during the historic trial. The elder Dodd’s political career came to an end following his censure on the floor of the Senate amid charges of misuse of campaign funds. Mr. Dodd was a student at Providence College when the institution dis-invited his father, also a graduate of the school, from making a commencement speech. Mr. Dodd said he will never forget an answer his father gave to a reporter about the value of public service following his retirement from the Senate.

“I can remember this as if it was an hour ago, she asked him ‘if you knew in 1932 when you graduated from law school and began to work as the director of the national youth administration in Connecticut how your political career would end, would you do it again?'” Mr. Dodd said. “He said he’d do it again in a minute. He said there’s no other calling in life where you can do as much for as many people as you can through public service. …I thought, you know something, if he can say that after all he’d been through, who would have blamed him if he said ‘are you kidding me? After what I’ve been through? Do it again? Are you crazy?’ He gave a totally different answer. And I’ve thought about it a million times. You know, what better motivation?”