GOP kisses up to liberal Chafee

Chances for a Democratic takeover of the Senate may hinge on whether Republican maverick Lincoln Chafee survives the Rhode Island primary.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Politics, News, Walter Shapiro, 2006 Elections

AP photos / Salon photo collage

Sheldon Whitehouse, Mayor Steve Laffey and incumbent GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee

Sept. 1, 2006 | PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- One of the nastier attack ads currently being aired anywhere in the country is being aired here, and is sponsored by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the official arm of the GOP majority. The 30-second spot employs all the traditional techniques of political fear-mongering: a voice-of-doom narrator, grainy photographs, purported FBI warnings, menacing footage of a Willie Horton-like villain (a Hispanic illegal immigrant) and the stark closing question about the challenger, "Will he put our security at risk in the Senate?"

The factual basis for the commercial is flimsy. The mayor of Cranston agreed in 2005 to accept Mexican-government-issued matricula cards as a valid form of identification, a position so radical that it is shared by the U.S. Treasury Department. But that justification is enough to allow the NRSC to tar the mayor, who is now running for the Senate, as a permissive advocate of open borders who is seemingly eager for every resident of a Mexican barrio to move into the mansions of Newport.

What makes this GOP smear attack so unusual is that the target of this venom, Mayor Steve Laffey, is a Republican. And he is the only Rhode Island Senate candidate who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, supports the Iraq war and believes in the magic elixir of Miracle-Gro tax cuts. Laffey's unforgivable sin in the eyes of the national Republican establishment is that he has an even-money chance of defeating antiwar incumbent GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee in the traditionally low-turnout Sept. 12 party primary.

There are other Senate races that are weird (Republican Katherine Harris impersonating Cruella De Vil in Florida), but none that are simultaneously as odd and as important as the Rhode Island race. Without picking up Rhode Island, the Democrats have almost no chance of winning back the Senate. Chafee represents the only hope for the Republicans to hold the seat in a state so blue that no GOP presidential candidate has received 40 percent of the vote here since 1988. (Bush's approval rating in Rhode Island is a comically low 20 percent.) If Laffey, a populist conservative, were to win the primary, all the polls and portents suggest that he would be whomped by Democratic nominee Sheldon Whitehouse, a former state attorney general.

It is hard to imagine a senator more diffident and more different from the blow-dried norm than the aristocratic 53-year-old Chafee, who was originally appointed to the Senate in 1999 on the death of his father, John Chafee, who had served since 1977. His lonely guy approach to politics transcends his voting record (Chafee was the only GOP senator to vote against the Iraq war and also opposed the Bush tax cuts) or his outspoken liberal views on social issues (during last Saturday night's final TV debate with Laffey, the senator stressed his support for gay marriage and bravely opposed capital punishment for Osama bin Laden).

Even in this hard-fought primary campaign, Chafee's style is midway between understatement and invisibility. Speaking Tuesday to about 150 elderly voters after having lunch at the Cranston senior center ("Mayor Laffey's Suggestion Box" was mounted on the wall right outside the cafeteria), Chafee's vote-for-me appeal lasted less than two minutes.

"As you know, there is a primary September 12, so that's a big day," Chafee declared in a soft voice as he neared his rousing crescendo. "The differences here are great and your choices here are great. Senator Chafee has been very, very steady and won't blow with the wind on issues." Aside from talking about himself in the third person, Chafee's only overtly political move was raising his hand to volunteer to say grace, offering a nondenominational seven-second blessing that ended with the appeal to "make us ever mindful of the needs of others."

As Chafee, wearing a plaid suit and white shirt, made his low-key circuit of the room -- limiting his electioneering to half-sentences like "Any help you can give me" -- the response, even among partisan Democrats, was friendly. But finding likely primary voters in a state where registered Republicans (just 69,000) are as rare as Eskimos in Florida was a different story. A typical answer to the will-you-be-voting query came from retiree Anthony Galasso, who looked up from his watery vegetable soup to say, "I'm a registered Democrat, so I guess I can't vote in the primary. But I'm voting for Chafee. He'll make it to November."

Chafee's fidelity to the Republican Party reflects more homage to the faith of his father than a rational belief that the party's moderate wing will ever regain power. Courted by the Democrats after Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords defected from the GOP in 2001, Chafee told me back then that he was committed to the Republicans for "the long haul. It will take something pretty extreme for that to change."

Next page: "The Whitehouse family and the Chafee family have been very close"