Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

We say we want honesty, straightforwardness and candor from our politicians, but we get it so rarely that we sometimes don’t know how to handle it when we do. That was often the case with Linc Chafee.

Reporters always loved seeing former U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee show up at Rhode Island events when he was in office, because we knew we could ask him virtually any question and he frequently would tell us exactly what was on his mind, without a lot of the rhetorical run-around most politicians give you.
Not always, but most of the time, Chafee would blurt out his unvarnished thoughts, even when it might not have been in his best interest to do so.
Chafee was never an enemy to the truth, as too many politicians are, but often it turned out not to be his friend. He held a high position and seemed to think it was his obligation to tell people what he was thinking and how he looked at things.
The most famous example of this is when he told reporters he wouldn’t be voting to re-elect fellow Republican George W. Bush in 2004 and would instead write in the name of Bush’s father. At the time he said this, he already knew he was facing a brutal re-election contest of his own in two years, one that would likely involve a Republican primary.
But Chafee was asked, and having the courage of his convictions as usual, cave a candid and truthful answer without regard for what others might think. There are many words in politics for someone like that, but the one not used often enough is in this case the most descriptive: leader.
Like him or not, and there were people in both camps, Chafee was seldom anything but genuine.
Such is the case with “Against the Tide,” the appropriately-titled memoir of his time in the Senate that Chafee penned for release on April 1. The author pulls no punches about where he stands right from the book’s subtitle: “How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President.”
The book is a must-read for any politics junkie in Rhode Island and it has a lot to say to a broader audience about the still-toxic partisan atmosphere in Washington, D.C. as we head into another presidential election year.
In perhaps the most noted passage of the book so far, Chafee all but applauds the voters of 2006 for kicking him out of the Senate to exorcize what his title calls the compliant nature of the body vis-à-vis the Bush administration.

The system works best when power remains in the hands of the voters. I was a casualty of the system working in 2006, and while defeat is never easy, I give the voters credit. They made the connection between re-electing even popular Republicans at the cost of leaving the Senate in the hands of a leadership they had learned to mistrust. In Rhode Island, Montana, Virginia, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Ohio, the voters did what they had to do to check the Bush-Cheney agenda.

As Chafee described it in an interview last week, “I lived through a seven-year term in the Senate witnessing some amazing events — the 50-50 tied Senate, (Vermont Sen. Jim) Jeffords leaving the Republican Party to become an independent (which shifted the Senate majority temporarily to Democrats), of course the events of Sept. 11, a president who was elected after losing the popular vote — and I wanted to give my perspective, to get it down on paper and be respectful of everyone.”
Respectful, maybe, certainly not reverent when it comes to the president and vice-president.
Describing a 2001 Oval Office conversation with the President, Chafee recalls:

When the meeting ended, I felt worse about him than when I arrived. I was shaken. I admire old-fashioned virtues, chief among them honesty. Even at this early date in his tenure, the president had demonstrated an undeniable capacity for mendacity … The man, and by that I mean the inner man, the essential man, seemed unequal to the awesome powers entrusted to him. I was worried about the damage he might do over the next years, never mind in a second term, which seemed unthinkable at the time.

Some folks were surprised last week when Chafee announced he would vote in the Democratic Primary for Barack Obama, but I had already written “he must be for Obama, then” in the margin of the advanced copy of Chafee’s book that I had been reading, next to the line that read: “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment, in my view.” And sure enough, when reporters asked Chafee about his endorsement of Obama, he cited the Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war.
Chafee, the only Republican in the Senate to vote against authorizing the president to go to war in Iraq, told me last week “There never was any evidence that Saddam Hussein was a threat. How could we as a Congress swallow that?” 
This is more of a political memoir than an outright autobiography, so while there is some mention of his early political career and the influence of his father, the late Sen. John H. Chafee, Chafee doesn’t include what J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield called “all that David Copperfield crap” about his forbearers and early life. The book is better for that.
Chafee’s disarming, self-effacing humor comes through in a paragraph where he describes the start of his political career, when he had 8,000 palm cards printed and went door-to-door in Warwick as a candidate for delegate to the 1985 Rhode Island Constitutional Convention:

I picked a house, rang the bell, and a moment later a woman looked out at me with apprehension. ‘Oh, no, is he trying to sell me a vacuum cleaner? Does he want me to change my religion? I smiled, held up a card and told her my name and asked her to support me as a delegate to the convention. Her face brightened in a wide smile of relief. There was nothing to buy, no religious conversion needed. I thought, ‘I can do this eight thousand times!' I had a new enthusiasm as I walked every street in the district and went on to win election as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

Although many accuse him of having been the equivalent of a liberal Democrat all along (he made news at the end of last year by dropping his Republican voter registration and becoming an independent), Chafee declares:

The great history of my party belongs to me, not just to the newcomers who changed it into the Old Dixie club. I went to Washington as a proud Republican, even if I did not think we should hang our hats on denying climate change, overturning Roe v. Wade and wearing our righteousness on our sleeves or our patriotism on our lapels.”

 Always the moderate, Chafee ends the book by predicting the dawning of a New Centrism, and a post-partisan political reality.

As the Bush administration grinds to a welcome constitutional end, the Republican and Democratic parties remain retrenched at the political extremes (a particularly well-written passage reads.) Republicans have led poorly and Democrats have shown themselves unable to lead at all … I believe this is the way for American politics: centrist Americans, coalescing around third-party candidates who are focused on the future; on solving, not exploiting the problems we face. If one or both parties don’t start heeding the center,(the book warns) the voters will make a tectonic shift in politics on their own. They will leave their most partisan fellow citizens behind, in ever-shrinking tents of red and blue.

Get the book (It is available for pre-order on Amazon.com). Whether you want to praise Chafee for his political courage or lash out at his liberal predilections, you will not be disappointed.