The last of the liberal Republicans?

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

LITTLE COMPTON, R.I. - It is hard to imagine two politicians less similar than Steve Laffey and the man whose job he’s trying to take, Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Laffey and Chafee both carry the Republican label. The similarity ends there.

Laffey, the mayor of Cranston, R.I., and the challenger in the Sept. 12 Republican primary, is a hyperkinetic, fast-talking son of the working class.

“My father was a tool maker, he never went to college. I’m the only Laffey in the history of Laffeys who ever went to college,” he said. He graduated from Bowdoin College and Harvard Business School, before launching a career which led to serving as president of the Morgan Keegan investment firm in Memphis.

“I grew up with no money. I watched my dad lose his job in the 1970s when foreign imports were taking jobs away,” Laffey said.

Growing up in Cranston, when the family would run short of money, his mother, a nurse who worked the late shift, would feed the kids on mayonnaise and ketchup sandwiches on day-old white bread.

Laffey is a Reagan-loving populist, but also idolizes Bobby Kennedy for his combativeness –- he cites the moment he saw film footage of Kennedy interrogating Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa before a Senate investigating committee.

Last Saturday Laffey went out for a hot day of sprinting from one house to another along Flint Corn Road and Dorothy Avenue in suburban Portsmouth, R.I.

Laffey’s fired-up advance team included pals such as Eddie Curran, his former junior high school classmate. “He’s knocked on 30,000 doors,” Laffey said.

Also fanning out to drum up support for Laffey were his wife Kelly and four of his five children. 

Laffey tends towards the fleshy and after 20 minutes of campaigning, his shirt was drenched in sweat.

If perspiration were the measure of who’ll come out on top in this race, Laffey will win easily.

He offers a platform of spending cuts, tax cuts, school vouchers, and a crash program to develop solar power, domestic oil, and nuclear power.

“We’ve got to get off foreign oil. We’ve got to have a program like putting man on the moon,” Laffey told Republican Mike Kane on his doorstep in Portsmouth. “We have to permanently drive oil down to $15 a barrel and let Iran deal with its own people.”

Laffey assailed Chafee for voting against tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. “He wants to raise taxes on everybody including the middle class,” Laffey said.

A few minutes later, Laffey got an earful from Pete McIntyre, a retired Navy man and defense industry worker and Republican member of the Portsmouth town council. “The one thing that concerns me more than anything else is can you beat Whitehouse?” McIntyre told Laffey, referring to Democratic candidate Sheldon Whitehouse, who is well funded for the fall election.

If Laffey beats Chafee in the primary, “You don’t know where the Chafee Democrats will go. And the moderate-to-liberal Republicans, where are they going to go? Are they going to stay home (in November)? Will they go with Whitehouse?” worried McIntyre, who admires Laffey, calling him “an excellent man in what he promised to do for the state.”

Chafee in contrast
Hours later, as Chafee campaigned at a fundraising barbeque for the Village Improvement Society in Little Compton, he offered a contrast with his rival.

Chafee was quiet, shy, and hesitant when he met the barbeque eaters, almost apologetic for intruding on their free time.

Patrician in pedigree, lean in physique, and detached in manner, Chafee says, “the most significant difference besides the issues is personalities … My opponent is more a bull in a china shop. He enjoys the antagonistic approach.”

Chafee’s father, John Chafee, represented Rhode Island in the Senate for 22 years and was Rhode Island’s governor before that.

The elder Chafee personified the old-fashioned upper-crust, socially liberal Republican politician that once was so common in the Northeast.

In 1999, after John Chafee died in office, Rhode Island’s Republican governor appointed Lincoln Chafee to take his dad’s seat.

There’s no other Republican senator quite like Lincoln Chafee.