Love Chafee, Hate Bush

• By Nicole Duran
• Roll Call Staff
• Oct. 24, 2006, Midnight

WARWICK, R.I. — If the Rhode Island Senate race were a popularity contest, Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R) would have no trouble winning re-election.

Unfortunately for Chafee, his opponent’s message that a vote for Chafee is essentially a vote in favor of President Bush seems to be resonating in the Ocean State.

Chafee successfully has transferred on to himself the voters’ affection for his father and predecessor, the late Sen. John Chafee (R), who died in office in 1999.

Rhode Islanders genuinely like the younger Chafee, who previously served as mayor of Warwick, the state’s second-largest city, before being appointed to complete his father’s Senate term.

Roberta Coughlin of Cranston, who waits tables at the Eddie & Son diner in downtown Providence, says she is not very political. Nonetheless she has served Chafee numerous times, as she did his father when he was alive, and finds him extremely personable.

The 53-year-old Senator brings his family into the diner — a regular stop for local pols and powerbrokers — and just comes across as a regular person, Coughlin said.

“He’s very humble,” she said.

And that is where the Chafee appeal lies. Even people who say they plan to vote for Sheldon Whitehouse (D), the state’s former attorney general who has a slight lead in the polls, say they like Chafee.

“I don’t think Lincoln Chafee is a bad guy, but it’s been how long since the Democrats have had anything to say” about how the country is run, asked Pete Wilson of Narragansett, who was part of a pro-Whitehouse rally outside Toll Gate High School in Warwick last Thursday night, where the two candidates squared off in their first televised debate.

“He’s a straight shooter and he does have the name,” Wilson continued. “You have to look at what’s best for Rhode Island. If [Chafee] ran as an Independent, I think the race would be much tougher.”

As much as Chafee reminds voters that he was the only Senate Republican to oppose giving Bush the authority to invade Iraq and as much as he plays up how he differs with the national GOP, it is his party affiliation that ultimately might end his Senate career.

“I think people like Lincoln Chafee a lot, but there’s so much antipathy toward Bush that Chafee has become the proxy target,” said Darrell West, the political scientist who runs the Brown University poll.

“If he loses, it has very little do with Lincoln Chafee,” West said. “It will be because of Bush.”

Chafee seems keenly aware of that fact.

During the debate he told voters that he has “not actually been in sync with the president,” and ticked off the number of times he has bucked his party in his almost seven years in the Senate. (Chafee previously has acknowledged that he did not vote for Bush in 2004, instead writing in the name of his father, former President George H.W. Bush.)

Rhode Islanders can look at the statue of the Independent Man that sits atop the statehouse in Providence and think, “that’s Lincoln Chafee,” he said.

Happy Bucks for a Happy Warrior

During a presentation to the Warwick Rotary Club earlier in the day, Chafee sounded more like a Democrat than a Republican. He talked about protecting the environment and the need for stability in the Middle East.

If he is returned to the Senate, Chafee said he would use his seat on the Environment and Public Works Committee and his chairmanship of the subcommittee on fisheries, wildlife and water to push Congress to force U.S. automakers to build more fuel-efficient cars. He also wants the federal government to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide as a way to rein in global warming.

“Shame on Americans for being such consumers,” Chafee, who drives a hybrid electric automobile, told the Rotarians.

Chafee received a warm reception from the group assembled for lunch at the Boys and Girls Clubs in Warwick, which was built thanks to an earmark Chafee won during the appropriations process.

Before Chafee began speaking, a slew of Rotarians stood up and threw “happy bucks” — money members donate to announce good news — into the pot in his honor.

One woman put in $1 to celebrate “happy shoers in the Senate.” Chafee once worked as a farrier, someone who shoes horses, in Canada. Another contributed $1 because she “already voted for Linc.” That prompted Chafee to spring up and throw his own “happy buck” into the pot.

While Chafee tries to hammer home that he can deliver for Rhode Island because he has been in “the right place at the right time in the right party,” Whitehouse’s campaign is based almost entirely on trying to hang Chafee’s party affiliation around him like an albatross.

“The price of Sen. Chafee bringing home that bacon is so high,” Whitehouse said during their extremely cordial, hourlong debate. He reminded the audience that the first vote Chafee takes during each new session of Congress is to make a Republican Senate Majority Leader.

“Once that leadership is in place, the dye is set,” Whitehouse said. “I accept [that] Lincoln Chafee prefers a different Republican Party, but reality is ... send someone down to vote them out of power. That is the only way to get the Bush agenda out.”

Chafee and Whitehouse differ very little in substance or on the issues. Both are polite, liberal politicians who hail from prominent Rhode Island families.

The Chafees are one of the “Five Families” — the term given to the wealthiest, most influential families in the state’s early history — while Whitehouse’s father was an ambassador. John Chafee and Whitehouse’s father, Charles Whitehouse, even were roommates at Yale, prompting a question from the debate audience about what the candidates’ fathers would say about the campaign if they were alive (neither answered very effectively).

Questioning Whitehouse’s Independence

The candidates’ similarities, combined with Bush’s unpopularity, have led Chafee to look for a new way to distinguish himself and to highlight his independence from party orthodoxy — and contrast that with Whitehouse’s own relationship with Democratic leaders.

Chafee held a news conference last week calling on Whitehouse to answer questions about a public corruption case that emerged when he was attorney general and that just ended with a former hospital president being sent to jail.

He spent most of the debate trying to put Whitehouse on the defensive about the controversy, suggesting that Whitehouse has blanched when faced with the prospect of challenging state Democratic powerbrokers who served on the hospital’s board and worked for the medical center.

“He made a calculated decision not to pursue [the hospital-statehouse case] based on who was involved,” Chafee alleged during an interview.

Whitehouse called Chafee’s allegations “desperate” and unfounded.

“When you’re desperate you revert to desperate measures,” Whitehouse said after the debate. “They’re bringing it up now because they got nothing else, because they urgently need to distract Rhode Island voters from the consequences of Lincoln Chafee’s vote for a Republican Senate.”

Whitehouse resisted Chafee’s efforts to engage him on the subject during the debate, calculating that there really is no upside in doing so because the issue is too obtuse to penetrate.

He acknowledges there is a risk in his strategy but said the issues and momentum are on his side.

“I’d rather be in the position of talking to voters about issues versus something that happened seven years ago,” Whitehouse said. “It’s complicated and, frankly, isn’t being explained very fairly by them anyway. I’d rather be in the spot where I’m talking to voters about what they care about.”

Whitehouse also is enjoying a financial advantage.

Chafee entered the final weeks of the campaign trailing Whitehouse in cash on hand. Whitehouse started October with $1.4 million in the bank, while Chafee had just $583,000.

Since then, Chafee contributed $500,000 from his own deep pockets and triggered the “Millionaires’ Amendment,” enabling Whitehouse to exceed federal campaign contribution limits.

The national Republican Party spared no expense getting Chafee through his tough primary with Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey and continues to lavish money on the race.

The Republican National Committee’s much-ballyhooed 72 Hour Program to get out the vote largely is credited with Chafee’s win in the historically low-turnout Republican primary.

’A General Is Different’

Chafee again will need the votes of independents and Democrats if he is to win Nov. 7, but he dismissed the idea that the results on Election Day will again turn on GOTV.

“In the primary, it was the most important — voter identification and GOTV,” Chafee said. “A general is different.

“It’s a close election, everything is going to count; it’s going to be debates, earned media ... paid media; it’s the combination,” he said.

Whitehouse said he is confident that if the race comes down to a ground game, his team is prepared.

“I’m waiting to see whether this vaunted Republican 72 Hour Program is really all it’s cracked up to be,” he said.

While the race undoubtedly will take a few more turns before it is over, in many ways the general election dynamics have not changed at all since the race began. It will still come down to whether Rhode Islanders like Chafee so much that they are willing to shed their Democratic preference and overlook the R after his name.

“There’s no doubt there’s deep affection in Rhode Island for the job that I’ve done, but they are very, very angry at President Bush,” Chafee said. “But I’m dealing with it.”