Given Washington’s prevailing partisan gridlock in the late ’90s, George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign pledges — to be a uniter, not a divider, and to pursue a humble foreign policy — struck Lincoln Chafee as harbingers of something better.
But a few months later, when vice president-elect Dick Cheney outlined a reactionary agenda during a luncheon meeting with five moderate senators, “[it] almost made me fall off my chair,” said Chafee, who proceeded to write the incoming VP a note, encouraging the White House to pursue “a unifying agenda.”
If Bush had heeded this advice, perhaps the results of the November 7 election — including Chafee’s defeat at the hands of Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse — might have been different.
Instead, although Chafee has about two months left in his term, a valedictory feeling pervaded a November 9 press availability held at his downtown Providence office, and it represented a perfected distillation of the senator’s utterly distinctive political persona.
Asked whether he wanted to scream about his loss, a calm Chafee said, “No, I knew what I was in for. I made conscious decisions.”
The senator acknowledge taking some satisfaction in the broad Democratic victories on Election Day, and he blamed Republican extremists, including his primary opponent, Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey and the Club for Growth, for contributing to his defeat. Taking himself out of the running for chair of the Rhode Island GOP, he said he would sharply oppose efforts by Laffey to claim the position. (In a statement, Laffey said he was not seeking the post, although, “If Senator Chafee truly wants to unify and grow the party, today’s statement was not a good first step.”)
Chafee defended his decision not to leave the Republican Party, saying that doing so could have hurt Rhode Island’s pull in the Senate, although he was now reassessing whether he would remain in the GOP. He said little about his next move, other than to say that he wanted to recuperate and is keeping his options open.
In a kind of parting shot to the Bush administration, the senator announced he would not support John Bolton’s nomination to become permanent ambassador to the UN, although his appointment of Robert Flanders to replace Bruce Selya on the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals may hang in the balance.
To some Rhode Island Republicans, Chafee’s comments were impolitic, if not ill-advised, and he can’t fade from view fast enough for conservatives. On the National Review Online, Patrick Casey called the senator’s six-point defeat “well deserved by a party that had forsaken ideas and good government for a quest for raw power. There was not a single issue discussed seriously in this year’s Chafee-Whitehouse match-up other than who hated Bush and his policies more. In the end, Rhode Islanders preferred a real registered Democrat over one who just pretended to be one.”
The national GOP, however, has a lot to learn from this heir to an appealing tradition of Republican moderation, the only Republican senator to vote against the war in Iraq, and perhaps that’s why the New York Times asked him to essentially repeat his parting thesis in an op-ed published Sunday.
During the past campaign, Chafee had an effective rejoinder to those who questioned his Republican credentials, describing his beliefs — in fiscal discipline, environmental protection, avoiding foreign entanglements, and keeping the government out of people’s bedrooms – as in keeping with the GOP’s core values.
The assembled print and TV reporters at this gathering felt more than a little wistful, in part since Chafee has been such an accessible and interesting figure.
We’ll see what the future holds. It’s not a stretch to think that Round Two of Chafee-Laffey could come with the 2010 Republican gubernatorial primary.