Brash GOP challenger presses Chafee in R.I.

CRANSTON, R.I. -- The Laffey campaign's secret weapon wears sneakers with tiny wheels on the bottom.

She's Stephen Laffey's 9-year-old daughter, and at Cranston's annual Greek Festival on Saturday, she made her famously brash father look shy, cutting sharp paths through the festival grounds to offer handshakes to anyone who would take them.

``I'm Sarah Laffey," she said. ``My dad's running for the US Senate."

Laffey, Cranston's irascible and energetic mayor, is within striking distance of pulling off an upset in tomorrow's Republican Senate primary in Rhode Island. Both sides agree that he has a real chance of defeating incumbent Senator Lincoln D. Chafee, who took over the seat from his legendary father, John, who died in office in 1999.

For Laffey, family touches have helped soften the image of the candidate, whose outbursts and ego have become well known to Rhode Island voters in his two terms as mayor of the state's third-largest city.

Yet despite the efforts of Sarah and the rest of gang, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has taken the highly unusual step of letting it be known that it will cede the seat to likely Democratic nominee Sheldon Whitehouse if Laffey wins. Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, the NRSC's chairman, has labeled Laffey ``bombastic" and said she believes Chafee is the only Republican who can win the general election, a sentiment backed up by polls.

Still, Laffey, 44, is projecting cool optimism in the closing days of the campaign. Working the festival grounds himself, sunscreen caked on his nose and bottled water dripping down his shirt, he tells all who ask that he'll win the primary with ease.

``We're going to take him out," he told one supporter, while still chewing the roast beef and potatoes he picked up while greeting kitchen workers. ``People really want serious change."

Late polls suggest contradictory outcomes -- one has Laffey up 17 points, another Chafee up 14 -- an indication of how difficult it is to gauge a GOP primary in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. But the two candidates have both said that the race is tight going into the primary.

Though the conservative Club for Growth is helping Laffey by painting the 53-year-old Chafee as a liberal, Chafee and the NRSC have tried to make Laffey the issue in the race. They're attacking him as a tax-raiser and a bully, highlighting his business record and confrontations he had with Cranston firefighters and a local elected official as evidence that Laffey is ill-suited for a deliberative body.

``You have to work with people in any legislative body -- that's just a prerequisite to getting anything done," Chafee said yesterday in an interview in North Kingstown, where he waved to drivers along Route 4 while aides held signs: ``Keep Chafee."

Mimicking his rival, the soft-spoken Chafee grits his teeth and hunches his shoulders forward while coming as close to a scowl as he ever does. ``He's tried to cast himself as, `I'm going to Washington to fight for you, the taxpayer. Washington's a mess,' " Chafee said. ``That's what I've been doing in my steady way -- exactly what I'm doing."

But Laffey said the attacks by Chafee and the NRSC will backfire on Chafee because Rhode Island voters knew him well before any national Republican figures tried to define him. The Republican Senate committee, he said, is ``vicious," ``overreaching," and ``foolish" to try to rally behind Chafee, by most measures the most liberal Republican in the Senate.

``The stuff they're doing makes no sense to anybody," Laffey said. ``The real reason they do it is they can't argue the issues."

The fact that Chafee could lose a Republican primary is extraordinary in itself, given the resonance of the Chafee family name and the leftward political leanings of Rhode Island. And in a year in which candidates are rushing to distance themselves from President Bush, no Republican senator has as deep a record as Chafee of breaking with the president, opposing him on tax cuts, the Iraq war, environmental issues, a Supreme Court justice, and even the president's own reelection.

But building from a small group of Bush-backing Republicans who are fed up with Chafee's independent streak, Laffey's campaign against the ``Washington establishment" has made deep inroads with independent voters who were initially inclined to support Chafee, said Victor Profughi, director of Rhode Island College's Bureau of Government Research and Services.

``Laffey has run an amazingly curious type of campaign -- presenting himself as the true Republican in the race, while recognizing that Bush is probably more unpopular here than in any state in the country," Profughi said.

``I've never quite seen a campaign like this, but it's brilliant."

Laffey aligns himself with the president on issues including abortion, taxes, and the war. But he excoriates Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and blasts Chafee for supporting pork-barrel projects. He bristles at the ``conservative" label, calling himself a ``reformer" above all else.

Chafee, he says, is ``incompetent," ``indecisive," and ``irrelevant."

Laffey portrays himself as a tough-guy, working-class contrast to Chafee, who is the scion of a well-heeled political dynasty and is a low-key presence in a Senate full of outsized characters. Some national conservatives have championed Laffey's campaign as a way to defeat what the Club for Growth calls a RINO -- a Republican in Name Only.

Laffey worked his way through Bowdoin College and Harvard Business School before ascending the Wall Street ranks. He turned around a fiscal crisis in his hometown after he became mayor in 2003 -- in part by raising property taxes, a move Chafee calls ``hypocritical" for an avowed tax-cutter.

On one level, the race is the inverse of last month's Democratic primary race in neighboring Connecticut. Whereas Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a moderate Democrat, was shunned by his party there for being too close to the president, Chafee, a moderate Republican, is in danger of being booted by the GOP in Rhode Island in part for straying too far from Bush and the Republican party line.

Robert Hebert, a 61-year-old Republican from Warwick, said he adored Chafee's father and was once fond of the son as well. But he said that Lincoln Chafee is out of touch now -- living in Virginia for much of the year with his family, and voting for the ``bridge to nowhere," a project in a remote Alaska town that has been criticized as an example of wasteful federal spending.

``His dad would be turning in his grave if he saw what his son is doing," Hebert said. ``He's lost contact with Rhode Island."

A major difference between Rhode Island and Connecticut, however, is that Chafee can't run as an independent if he loses the primary, as Lieberman is now doing in Connecticut.

That's why national Republican officials have poured more than $1 million into the Ocean State to help the Republican who gives them the most fits back in Washington. Polls show Whitehouse swamping Laffey in a head-to-head race, but Chafee running within a few points.

Chafee said he stands to benefit if unaffiliated voters show up in large numbers.

Mainly through the efforts of the Chafee campaign, some 14,000 voters who were previously registered as Democrats have dropped their party affiliations, permitting them to vote in the GOP primary.

But Chafee acknowledged that Laffey is doing better among independents than he ever banked on. And to Laffey, the attacks by national Republicans only strengthen his message.

``The last thing they want down in Washington is a real reformer like me," he said.

Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.