Love Chafee, Hate Bush
Roll Call Staff
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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.
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