observations on the smallest state in the union
Rhode Island’s Republican Senate primary race and the lines of demarcation between the incumbent Lincoln Chafee and the challenger Steven Laffey have taken a strange turn.
I turn briefly to the New Jersey Governor’s race of 2005, where the Demcrat Jon Corzine used a tagline against Republican Doug Forrester “Doug Forrester is George Bush’s Choice. Is He Yours?” That strikes me as one of the most hilarious political ads ever, because its sheer audacity: of course Doug Forrester is George Bush’s choice — he’s a Republican — How can he not be?
Steven Laffey now seems to be tapping into that very premise of connecting the candidate to the unpopular president — albeit Laffey makes various conservative (in both the good sense of the term and bad) against Bush and — by way of extension — the most liberal Republican in the Senate — Chafee. A paraphrase from the appearance on the Sunday Morning Chattering Class program “This Week with George Stephanopolis” — heard in soundbyte form — goes “I don’t think Karl Rove and the bunch know how to deal with someone as Independent as me.”
The irony is that Lincoln Chafee is the least reliable Republican for a party line vote. Laffey would be more ideologically in tune with the Republican Caucus, and therefore — drum roll please — less Independent, such as that is. Yet, Chafee has the full backing of the Republican Party Campaign Apparatus, far beyond that which the Democratic Counterpart gave Joseph Lieberman, and thus… “Lincoln Chafee is George Bush’s Choice. Is he Yours?” may as well be used for a goddamned Republican Primary.
Two notable votes where Lincoln Chafee broke with his party? He was the lone Republican Senator to vote against authorizing war against Iraq. When asked to defend his Republican credentials, he has said that he is a keeper of the “traditional” Republican values of fiscal responsibility, personal freedoms, the environment, and healthy skepticism of “foreign entanglements.” The other notable ote Chafee made against the Republican Establishment: he did not cast his ballot in 2004 for President George W Bush, instead writing in as a protest against the president George H W Bush.
Thus the Rhode Island Republican Senate Primary race double backs on itself and becomes a strange mirage of who both supports and doesn’t support at the same time the Republican Party of the moment.