ENDANGERED SPECIES: Although disparaged by critics as a RINO, Chafee holds up his core values as those of traditional Republicans.

Since Chafee had a likely lock on the party imprimatur, the posture offered another chance for the challenger to set himself against the status quo, complete with a news release — headlined “Laffey says No Thanks to Party Elite” — in which the mayor asserted with characteristic immodesty, “I belong to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roose¬velt, and Ronald Reagan, and am more interested in the endorsement of each individual Republican primary voter.” Chafee’s campaign, in turn, responded by using Laffey’s boycott of the state Republican convention to question his electability, as well as his commitment to the GOP.

With recent polls showing the two Republicans in a neck-and-neck race, Laffey’s Senate hopes will live or die on how well he can extend support beyond his conservative base in the state’s tiny Republican Party. Most Rhode Island voters are independents and it is they who will likewise decide Chafee’s fate. And with little more than three months until the September 12 primary, the sizzling campaign — already marked by a steady stream of back-and-forth negative advertising between both camps — is about to shift into a higher gear.

Although the two men represent decided stylistic and ideological contrasts, they both serve as lightning rods — Laffey because of his maximum leader-style penchant for confrontation, and Chafee because of his quirky identity amid a small and endangered herd of Republican moderates in the Senate.

Now, having enjoyed a meteoric rise by converting the mayoralty of the state’s third-largest city into a statewide bully pulpit over two terms, Laffey is audaciously trying to leverage his outsized profile into membership in the most elite club in US politics. Full of certitude and restless energy, the 44-year-old self-made multi-millionaire has an intuitive knack for politics and he relishes opportunities to maximize his public exposure. Laffey, naturally, brushes aside questions about how polls show him losing decisively in a potential November match-up with Democratic frontrunner Sheldon Whitehouse. And for now he’s giving Chafee — who essentially inherited his Senate seat after his revered father, John Chafee, died in 1999 — the run of his life.

Is Laffey really a populist?
The need to win over more moderate voters explains why the Laffey camp used the imminent state deadline for switching party affiliation to fuel speculation about whether Chafee, 53, who flirted with the prospect of leaving the GOP in 2001, would run as an independent. “A last-minute switch might be in the cards,” mused a June 22 statement from the Cranston mayor’s campaign, even though Chafee — whose Republicanism is rooted in his role as the scion of one of Rhode Island’s founding “Five Families” — told the Phoenix in 2003 it was “inconceivable” that he would change parties.

Laffey’s campaign also rolls out a serial news release describing the “Washington Taxpayer Rip-Off of the Week,” recounting, for example, how the 2006 federal Transportation Bill includes $950,000 to create an education center at a 90-year-old zoo in Jackson, Mississippi. The tacit suggestion is how government waste is endemic, and that someone like Laffey, perhaps best known for taking a tough stand against the overly generous compensation once received by Cranston crossing guards, is required to bring about change in the nation’s capital. Not coincidentally, his campaign motto is “the smallest state, the strongest voice.”

Unmentioned in all this is how Laffey, who enjoys the robust support of the Washington, DC-based Club for Growth, is far more conservative than Chafee, a moderate often disparaged by his critics as a RINO (Republican In Name Only). Laffey, for example, is unapologetically pro-life, he backs a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag-burning, and he has been a largely unquestioning supporter of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. By contrast, Chafee supports abortion-rights, he voted against the amendment to prohibit flag-burning, and he was the only Senate Republican to vote against the war. Occupying a curious middle ground, Chafee mixes and matches maverick stances and unusual idiosyncrasy (making a show of writing in the name of Bush’s father in 2004, for instance, rather than that of the current president himself) with a significant measure of fealty to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Laffey usefully eschews labels, describing himself in sometimes rote terms as a problem-solver competing against “career politicians.” He frequently invokes his roots as the son of a toolmaker who returned to Cranston, following a successful financial career in Tennessee, to put the troubled city on a strong economic footing. He calls the eight improvements in the city’s bond rating over roughly three years “the fastest and most dramatic turnaround we can find in Rhode Island.” In a move that alienated some supporters, Laffey has cultivated the state’s politically important Latino community, establishing a sister-city relationship, for example, with a Guatemalan community. He steers clear of mentioning how he once attributed his return to Cranston to divine guidance.