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 GOP Former Senator Slashes Bush On Gay
Marriage, War, Abortion
by The Associated Press
Posted: March 25, 2008 - 5:00 pm ET
(Providence, Rhode Island) Former Rhode Island
Senator. Lincoln Chafee often seemed to be odd man out in Washington.
He was one of the Senate's most liberal
Republicans, bucking his party on big issues such as Iraq, tax cuts, abortion
and the environment. His reserved, sometimes quirky personality was never a
smooth fit in the clubby Senate, where friendships can mean more than political
ties in making things happen.
In his new political memoir, Chafee revels in his
outsider status as he chronicles his disillusionment with the bitter
partisanship that dominated his seven years in the Senate. He wields a broad
brush, heaping blame on Republicans and Democrats alike for putting party
loyalty and ambition ahead of the public good.
Chafee points plenty of fingers, but President
George W. Bush, whom Chafee backed in 2000, earns his harshest scorn.
He brands Bush as two-faced for solemnly
promising during the campaign to be a ``uniter, not a divider,'' but later
pursuing a hard-line GOP agenda using wedge issues like abortion and gay rights.
Chafee complains about Bush's ``juvenile streak.'' And he rails at Bush's
pretending to search for weapons of mass destruction behind the White House
furniture during a skit at a black-tie Washington dinner.
``It was obscene for him to joke about a
falsehood that American troops had gone to their graves believing,'' Chafee
writes.
As U.S. casualties in Iraq mounted in fall 2003,
Chafee says he even considered a primary challenge against Bush but quickly
scrapped the idea after Saddam Hussein's capture boosted the president's
political stock.
Chafee bemoans the GOP's rightward drift and the
disappearance of moderate Republicans such as himself. Chafee's independence was
a matter of political survival in a Democratic-leaning state.
Chafee's hopes for a second full term were dashed
in 2006 by Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the Democratic wave that swept control
of Congress from the GOP. Chafee in 2004 voted for Bush's father, former
President George H.W. Bush, as a symbolic protest against the younger Bush. Last
year he became an independent.
Readers may detect a bit of pettiness, too.
Chafee does not bother to refer to his 2006 GOP primary opponent Steve Laffey by
name.
He recalls being ``irked and amused'' at the
parade of ``Democratic Bush enablers'' who campaigned in Rhode Island for
Whitehouse, such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton.
``I was the only candidate in the race with a
record of standing up to entrenched powers,'' writes Chafee, the lone GOP
senator to vote against authorizing the Iraq war.
The seeds of bitterness with Bush were sown early
on.
Chafee recalls Vice-President Dick Cheney
outlining a ``shockingly divisive'' agenda during a meeting with a handful of
moderate GOP senators shortly after Bush won the presidency in 2000.
``Cheney was not asking for support _ he was
ordering us to provide it,'' writes Chafee, who somehow seems surprised at such
hardball tactics by Cheney, a man infamous for his take-no-prisoners brand of
politicking. Chafee, too, seems stunned that none of his GOP colleagues put up
much of a fight.
Chafee reminded Cheney that the votes of their
small group of moderates would matter in a closely divided Senate.
``I chose my words carefully, and probably
stammered with the effort to contain my fury,'' he writes.
Cheney, ever the conservative warrior, brushed
Chafee aside.
Six years later, Rhode Island voters did roughly
the same thing, ending the political balancing act that was Chafee's Senate
career.
©365Gay.com 2008
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