LINCOLN CHAFEE, easily the Senate’s most liberal Republican, didn’t vote for George W. Bush in 2004. Instead, he lodged a “symbolic protest” by casting a write-in ballot for former president George H.W. Bush. Chafee’s beef with the younger Bush? Iraq (“a very, very costly quagmire”), tax cuts, the environment, gay marriage, abortion, the deficit–Rhode Island’s junior senator opposed the president’s “far-right-wing” policies on all of them.
Nevertheless, in his bid for reelection this year, Chafee has so far enjoyed the robust support of the White House, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Rhode Island state GOP, and leading Senate conservatives–despite the presence on the primary ballot of a right-of-center alternative, Cranston mayor Stephen Laffey. Explains NRSC spokesman Dan Ronayne, “You’re talking about probably the second most liberal state in the country.” (Rhode Island was the most pro-Gore state in 2000, giving him 61 percent of the vote, and second only to Massachusetts in its support for Kerry in 2004, at 59 percent of the vote.) “We think Chafee is the only Republican who can keep the seat.”
Lincoln Chafee is often “the only Republican,” or one of very few. He was the only Senate Republican to vote against the Iraq war resolution, and one of three to oppose a ban on partial-birth abortion. He was one of two Senate Republicans to vote against both of President Bush’s principal tax cuts, in May 2001 and May 2003 (the other was John McCain). Just last week, he was the only Republican to vote against Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Chafee’s “nay” on Alito piqued his conservative detractors. “The more I think about it, the more important it seems to me that Steve Laffey beat him,” wrote National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru. The Wall Street Journal played up the ethnic angle, noting that “Rhode Island has a higher proportion of Italian-Americans than any other state, and a vote against Judge Alito may not go over well, especially coming on the heels of Mr. Chafee’s ‘aye’ vote for an equally conservative Chief Justice whose name ends in a consonant.”
Chafee’s challenger himself concurs. “My phone’s been ringing off the hook,” Laffey told me last Wednesday, with calls “from Italian Americans” angry over Chafee’s vote against Alito. Laffey, who identifies himself as pro-life, blasts Chafee’s “litmus test” approach to judicial nominees. “As long as they’re qualified, they should be approved,” he says. In a statement explaining his vote, Chafee wrote, “I am a pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-Bill of Rights Republican” and thus could not vote for Bush’s appointee.
Chafee’s pickle over Alito captures the broader bind he finds himself in: The positions that will help him in the general election–such as rejecting Bush’s judicial nominees–will hurt him in the more conservative GOP primary. The primary is in September, which leaves plenty of time for Ocean State Republicans to either forget, or stew about, the Alito spat–and to compare Chafee with his plucky opponent.
Talk about an odd couple! The only thing Laffey and Chafee have in common is bulging bank accounts. But where Laffey is a former Wall Street whiz and self-made millionaire who never tires of discussing his up-by-the-bootstraps life story, Chafee comes from one of the “Five Families” that used to dominate Rhode Island politics. He is the son of the late governor-turned-senator John Chafee, and, to boot, he married into the Danforth family fortune. From there the contrasts only multiply. Laffey is a populist, Chafee a patrician. Laffey is garrulous, Chafee reserved. Laffey is blustery, Chafee soft-spoken. Laffey is a boat-rocker, Chafee a boat-steadier. While Laffey claims the support of “Reagan Democrats,” Chafee is a throwback to the Rockefeller Republicans against whom Reagan rebelled.
Given the pervasive skepticism about Laffey’s chances in a general election, his confidence can be disarming. He touts his rise from hardscrabble Cranston to Harvard Business School to Paine Webber to the presidency of a $500-million brokerage firm in Memphis. He returned to his hometown at the peak of his business earning potential and won the mayor’s race in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one.
Laffey then talks up his record of “taking on special interests and winning.” Cranston, Rhode Island’s third-largest city, had the worst bond rating in the country when he took office. Laffey raised taxes and restored the city’s bond rating to investment grade status “in less than two years.” He went on to defy the public-sector unions.
As the mayor tells it, the 39 crossing guards in town were earning the equivalent of $129 an hour with health insurance, while typically working one hour a day. The arrangement, buried deep in the police budget, “summed up . . . what had gone wrong in Rhode Island,” a state known for powerful unions and for corruption. After he fired the crossing guards and sought to privatize their jobs, the union took him to court. Laffey won. “Reagan had the air-traffic controllers,” Laffey brags, “I have the crossing guards.”
Small wonder he’s now persona non grata with organized labor. Laffey wears this as a badge of honor, and points out that he won reelection in 2004 by a landslide. Still, his anti-union image may dog his hopes of reaching the Senate. Unions still exercise prodigious sway in Rhode Island in the general election.
Before that, Laffey must win the primary, despite a pro-Chafee blitzkrieg by the national GOP establishment. Senate majority whip Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a leading conservative, has appeared at a Chafee fundraiser, as have White House chief of staff Andrew Card and commerce secretary Carlos Gutierrez, while Majority Leader Bill Frist’s PAC has pumped gobs of money in Chafee’s war chest. And according to Dan Ronayne, the NRSC has already spent upwards of $200,000 on anti-Laffey TV ads in Rhode Island.
These ads question Laffey’s conservative credentials, even though, by almost any measure, the mayor stands well to Chafee’s right. “Laffey has increased spending and raised taxes every year he’s been in office,” argues Ronayne. He’s now “trying to sell a bill of goods” by posing as a Reagan Republican. Citing Center for Responsive Politics research, the NRSC also notes that, while living in Tennessee, Laffey donated money to Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and to the Democratic opponents of Senator Frist and former GOP senator Fred Thompson.
But, at root, what explains the NRSC’s opposition to Laffey is Chafee’s perceived electability in one of the bluest of states. Whoever wins the primary will face a strong Democrat in the general–probably either secretary of state Matt Brown or former attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse. For Republicans, it comes down to the fear that Laffey will win the primary but lose in November. Says Ronayne, “Chafee would be a heavy favorite” against either Brown or Whitehouse. “Laffey would just get swamped.”
So Chafee must walk a fine line this year vis-à-vis Bush and the Republicans. “You tend to be supportive as you come into the [election] cycle,” he told the AP in December 2004. “If I need their help occasionally, I’m going to have to help them. But I’m not going to sacrifice my principles either.” Chafee’s press secretary, Stephen Hourahan, points out that, until the Alito vote, his boss had consistently supported Bush’s judicial nominees, even fiery conservatives such as Janice Rogers Brown. Chafee also backed the president on CAFTA and bankruptcy reform. In October, Chafee compared his relationship with the White House to “a mutual nonaggression pact.”
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee thinks otherwise. It has targeted Chafee as vulnerable. “Chafee Is A Rubber Stamp For National Republicans,” blared a recent DSCC press release. That statement is as preposterous as it is telling. Republicans and Democrats alike seem to agree that Chafee is the only Republican who can keep the seat. As Hourahan put it, “If we lose that seat, it’ll be gone forever.”
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
